A.4.4 Introduction to named types

A.4.4.1 IDL naming terminology

Notation for naming can be confusing, so some care is needed. Our specification is not formally rigorous, but we have tried to illustrate enough points with examples so that situations likely to arise in practice can be handled.

IDL Naming Terminology

By "the IDL name of an IDL entity", we mean the string that is the simple name of that entity. An IDL entity can be declared at the top-level or nested inside some other IDL entity. We say that the outer IDL entity encloses the inner one. We will sometimes elide the quotation marks in describing the names of IDL (and other entities) when no confusion is likely to result.

Here is an IDL example:

module A{
  interface B{
    struct c {long foo;};};}

The name of thestruct is the stringc. The name of the interface is the stringB. The name of the module is the stringA. The name of thestruct member is the stringfoo. The innermost enclosing IDL entity of thestruct is the interface namedB. The innermost enclosing module of the struct is the module namedA.

Lisp Naming Terminology

The name of a symbol is a string used to identify the symbol. Packages are collections of symbols. A symbol has a home package, which also has a name. A package can be named by a symbol or a string. We sometimes loosely say "the package x" when we mean "the package named by x".

A package may have nicknames, and we will consider that the nicknames of a package name the package. Unless otherwise stated, we will assume that distinct package names refer to distinct packages.

The notation for symbols consists of three concatenated parts: the name of the home package of the symbol, followed by the character ":", followed by the name of the symbol. Case is not significant when this notation is used. Thus, all symbols generated by this mapping are external symbols of their home package.

A symbol can name a function, a package, a class, a type, a slot, or a variable. These namespaces are disjoint. All alphabetic characters in the names of symbols used in this document are upper-case unless otherwise stated.

Thus, the names notated here are implicitly converted to uppercase when they name a symbol. For example, when we write the symbol named
hello-goodbye or the symbolhello-goodbye, we actually mean the symbol whose name is the stringHELLO-GOODBYE.