This chapter describes several of the basic building blocks of Modelica such as characters and lexical units including identifiers and literals. Without question, the smallest building blocks in Modelica are single characters belonging to a character set. Characters are combined to form lexical units, also called tokens. These tokens are detected by the lexical analysis part of the Modelica translator. Examples of tokens are literal constants, identifiers, and operators. Comments are not really lexical units since they are eventually discarded. On the other hand, comments are detected by the lexical analyzer before being thrown away.
The information presented here is derived from the more formal specification in Appendix B.
The character set of the Modelica language is Unicode, but restricted to the Unicode characters corresponding to 7-bit ASCII characters in several places; for details see section B.1.
Identifiers are sequences of letters, digits, and other characters such as underscore, which are used for naming various items in the language. Certain combinations of letters are keywords represented as reserved words in the Modelica grammar and are therefore not available as identifiers.
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 names 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, but the redundant escapes (’\?’ and ’\"’) are the same as the corresponding non-escaped variants (’?’ and ’"’). A full BNF definition of the Modelica syntax and lexical units is available in Appendix B.
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.
The following Modelica keywords are reserved words and may not be used as identifiers, except as listed in section B.1:
| algorithm | discrete | false | loop | pure |
| and | each | final | model | record |
| annotation | else | flow | not | redeclare |
| elseif | for | operator | replaceable | |
| block | elsewhen | function | or | return |
| break | encapsulated | if | outer | stream |
| class | end | import | output | then |
| connect | enumeration | impure | package | true |
| connector | equation | in | parameter | type |
| constant | expandable | initial | partial | when |
| constrainedby | extends | inner | protected | while |
| der | external | input | public | within |
Literal constants are unnamed constants that have different forms depending on their type. Each of the predefined types in Modelica has a way of expressing unnamed constants of the corresponding type, which is presented in the ensuing subsections. Additionally, array literals and record literals can be expressed.
A floating point number is expressed as a decimal number in the form of a sequence of decimal digits optionally followed by a decimal point, optionally followed by an exponent. At least one digit must be present. The exponent is indicated by an E or e, followed by an optional sign (+ or -) and one or more decimal digits. The minimal recommended range is that of IEEE double precision floating point numbers, for which the largest representable positive number is 1.7976931348623157E+308 and the smallest positive number is 2.2250738585072014E-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:
Literals of type Integer are sequences of decimal digits, e.g. as in the integer numbers 33, 0, 100, 30030044. [Negative numbers are formed by unary minus followed by an integer literal]. The minimal recommended number range is from -2147483648 to +2147483647 for a two’s-complement 32-bit integer implementation.
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 B.1 for allowed characters) apart from double quote ("") and backslash (\), including new-line, can be directly included in a string without using an escape code. Certain characters in string literals can be represented using escape codes, i.e., the character is preceded by a backslash (\) within the string. Those characters are:
| \’’ | single quote – may also appear without backslash in string constants. |
| \"" | double quote |
| \? | question-mark – may also appear without backslash in string constants. |
| \\ | backslash itself |
| \a | alert (bell, code 7, ctrl-G) |
| \b | backspace (code 8, ctrl-H) |
| \f | form feed (code 12, ctrl-L) |
| \n | newline (code 10, ctrl-J), same as literal newline |
| \r | carriage return (code 13, ctrl-M) |
| \t | horizontal tab (code 9, ctrl-I) |
| \v | vertical tab (code 11, ctrl-K) |
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:
”\tThis is\" between\" us\n"”
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:
]
The predefined operator symbols are formally defined on page B.1 and summarized in the table of operators in section 3.2.
2.2 Comments
There are two kinds of comments in Modelica which are not lexical units in the language and therefore are treated as whitespace by a Modelica translator. The whitespace characters are space, tabulator, and line separators (carriage return and line feed); and whitespace cannot occur inside tokens, e.g., <= must be written as two characters without space or comments between them. [The comment syntax is identical to that of C++]. The following comment variants are available:
Modelica comments do not nest, i.e., /* */ cannot be embedded within /* */. The following is invalid:
There is also a kind of “documentation comment,” really a documentation string that is part of the Modelica language and therefore not ignored by the Modelica translator. Such “comments” may occur at the ends of declarations, equations, or statements or at the beginning of class definitions. For example: