OSF DCE Application Development Guide--Core Components

OSF DCE Application Development Guide—Core Components
Constant Constant width typeface is used for source code examples (in IDL or
in C) that are displayed separately from regular text.
17.2.2 Special Symbols
IDL documentation uses the following symbolic notations:
[item] Italic brackets surrounding an item, which may include brackets in
regular typeface, indicate that the item contained within them is
optional.
[item] Brackets shown in regular typeface surrounding a variable item indicate
that the brackets are a required when the item is included, whether or not
the item itself is required.
item ... Ellipsis points following an item indicate that the item may occur one or
more times.
item , ... If an item is followed by a literal punctuation character and then by
ellipsis points, the item may occur either once without the punctuation
character or more than once with the punctuation character separating
each instance.
... If ellipsis points are shown on a line by themselves, the item or set of
items in the preceding line may occur any number of additional times.
item | item If several items are shown separated by vertical bars, exactly one of
those items must occur.
17.3 IDL Lexical Elements
The following subsections describe these IDL lexical elements:
• Identifiers
• Keywords
• Punctuation characters
• Whitespace
• Case sensitivity
17.3.1 Identifiers
The character set for IDL identifiers comprises the alphabetic characters A to Z and a to
z, the digits 0 to 9, and the _ (underscore) character. An identifier must start with an
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