This page has an overview of notations used when writing Gilda programs. To start here is a brief list describing how statements are coded.

• Statements are case insensititive except for quoted text and data format specifiers.
  A cannonical pretty printer is provided that adjusts the case of text and indents nested blocks of code. You can mostly write code in lower case and without indentation and it will clean it up.


• Source code is written using only printable ASCII characters and, of course, end of line delimiters.
  Non-printable characters (including tabs) are not permitted.


• Any of these different types of line delimiters can be used.

  Return/Line Feed        Line Feed
  Return                  Line Feed/Return
  

  
  
• Only one statement per line is allowed.
  An ampersand after a partial statement continues the statment on the next line.
  A partial statement ending in a comma is implicitly continued.


• Spaces can be used between tokens to make code easier to read.
  Spaces may be required in some places to avoid ambiguity (e.g. between a keyword and a variable name).

Here is brief summary of the most common terms are used throughout this reference. This lexicon specification has formal syntactic definitions of these terms.

Variable    - A variable, pointer or field reference
Pointer     - A pointer variable
Parameter   - A parameter variable
Array       - An array valiable
Array Range - A subscript range:  [Static  "to"]  Static, ...
Field       - An element within a structure

Type        - A primitive or user type
Primitive   - A variable, pointer or field of a numeric or string type
Integer     - An integer type:  Byte, Parcel, Word, or Cell
Real        - A real type:  Single or Double
Numeric     - A simple variable with an integer or real type
User Type   - A structure or an enumerated type

Enumaration - An enumerated value
Quote       - A quoted text string
Procedure   - Name of a Method, Function, or Sequence procedure

Expression  - An expression of any type
Algebraic   - An expression of a numeric type
Static      - An untyped constant expression

Condition   - A conditional expression that may have multiple comparisons
Untyped     - An integer expression where operands are all constants or micros

Legend

Notations used throughout this reference that describe the syntax of statements follow these conventions:

Phrase*             Repeat a phrase zero or more times

Phrase+             Repeat a phrase one or more times                 

Phrase | Phrase     Choice list of phrase

{ Phrase | ... }    Group a list of phrases

[ Phrase ]          Optional phrase group

( Phrase )          A nested phrase enclosed by (), {}, or []

single quote        Literal characters or case sensitive text

'A' to 'B'          A range of characters

'^M' and '^J'       End of line characters:  Return and Line Feed

Item - C            Exclude characters from a superset of characters