OSF DCE Application Development Guide--Core Components

OSF DCE Application Development Guide—Core Components
A keyword, identifier, or number not preceded by a punctuation character must be
preceded by whitespace. A keyword, identifier, or number not followed by a punctuation
character must be followed by whitespace. Unless we note otherwise, any punctuation
character may be preceded and/or followed by whitespace.
When enclosed in "" (double quotes) or ’’ (single quotes), whitespace constructs are
treated literally. Otherwise, they serve only to separate other lexical elements and are
ignored.
Just as in C, the character sequence /* (slash and asterisk) begins a comment, and the
character sequence */ (asterisk and slash) ends a comment. For example:
/* all natural */
import "potato.idl"; /* no preservatives */
Comments do not nest.
17.3.5 Case Sensitivity
The IDL compiler does not force the case of identifiers in the generated code.
The only case sensitivity issue that you have to be aware of is the implications involved
in calling generated stubs from languages other than C.
17.4 IDL Versus C
IDL resembles a subset of ANSI C. The major difference between IDL and C is that there
are no executable statements in IDL.
17.4.1 Declarations
An interface definition specifies how operations are called, not how they are
implemented. IDL is therefore a purely declarative language.
17.4.2 Data Types
To support applications written in languages other than C, IDL defines some data types
that do not exist in C and extends some data types that do exist in C. For example, IDL
defines a Boolean data type.
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