Chapter 2 Lexical Structure

Modelica identifiers, used for naming classes, variables, constants, and other items, are of two forms. The first form always starts with a letter or underscore (‘_’), followed by any number of letters, digits, or underscores. Case is significant, i.e., the identifiers Inductor and inductor are different. The second form (Q-IDENT) starts with a single quote, followed by a sequence of any printable ASCII character, where single-quote must be preceded by backslash, and terminated by a single quote, e.g., '12H', '13\’H', '+foo'. Control characters in quoted identifiers have to use string escapes. The single quotes are part of the identifier, i.e., 'x' and x are distinct identifiers. The redundant escapes ('\?' and '\"') are the same as the corresponding non-escaped variants ('?' and '"'), but are only for use in Modelica source code. A full BNF definition of the Modelica syntax and lexical units is available in appendix A.

A name is an identifier with a certain interpretation or meaning. For example, a name may denote an Integer variable, a Real variable, a function, a type, etc. A name may have different meanings in different parts of the code, i.e., different scopes. The interpretation of identifiers as names is described in more detail in chapter 5. The meaning of package names is described in more detail in chapter 13.

[Example: A name: Ele.Resistor]

A component reference is an expression containing a sequence of identifiers and indices. A component reference is equivalent to the referenced object, which must be a component. A component reference is resolved (evaluated) in the scope of a class (section 4.4), or expression for the case of a local iterator variable (section 10.6.9).

[Example: A component reference: Ele.Resistor.u[21].r]

The following Modelica keywords are reserved words that cannot be used where IDENT is expected in the language grammar (appendix A):

In particular, it is not allowed to declare an element or enumeration literal with these names. This also applies to the identifiers that name the predefined types Real, Integer, Boolean, and String, see section 4.8.

[Example: Not all predefined types have names with restrictions:

]

A floating point number is expressed as a decimal number in the form of a sequence of decimal digits followed by a decimal point, followed by decimal digits, followed by an exponent indicated by E or e followed by a sign and one or more decimal digits. The various parts can be omitted, see UNSIGNED-REAL in section A.1 for details and also the examples below. The minimal recommended range is that of IEEE double precision floating point numbers, for which the largest representable positive number is $1.7976931348623157\times {10}^{308}$ and the smallest positive number is $2.2250738585072014\times {10}^{-308}$. For example, the following are floating point number literal constants:

The same floating point number can be represented by different literals. For example, all of the following literals denote the same number:

The last variant shows that that the leading zero is optional (in that case decimal digits must be present). Note that 13 is not in this list, since it is not a floating point number, but can be converted to a floating point number.

Literals of type Integer are sequences of decimal digits, e.g., as in the integer numbers 33, 0, 100, 30030044. The range of supported Integer literals shall be at least large enough to represent the largest positive IntegerType value, see section 4.8.2.

[Negative numbers are formed by unary minus followed by an integer literal.]

The two Boolean literal values are true and false.

String literals appear between double quotes as in "between". Any character in the Modelica language character set (see section A.1 for allowed characters) apart from double quote ("") and backslash (\), including new-line, can be directly included in a string without using an escape sequence. Certain characters in string literals can be represented using escape sequences, i.e., the character is preceded by a backslash (\) within the string. Those characters are:

For example, a string literal containing a tab, the words: This is, double quote, space, the word: between, double quote, space, the word: us, and new-line, would appear as follows:

Concatenation of string literals in certain situations (see the Modelica grammar) is denoted by the + operator in Modelica, e.g., "a" + "b" becomes "ab". This is useful for expressing long string literals that need to be written on several lines.

The "\n" character is used to conceptually indicate the end of a line within a Modelica string. Any Modelica program that needs to recognize line endings can check for a single "\n" character to do so on any platform. It is the responsibility of a Modelica implementation to make any necessary transformations to other representations when writing to or reading from a text file.

[For example, a "\n" is written and read as-is in a Unix or Linux implementation, but written as "\r\n" pair, and converted back to "\n" when read in a Windows implementation.]

[For long string comments, e.g., the info annotation to store the documentation of a model, it would be very inconvenient, if the string concatenation operator would have to be used for every line of documentation. It is assumed that a Modelica tool supports the non-printable newline character when browsing or editing a string literal. For example, the following statement defines one string that contains (non-printable) newline characters:

]