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Naming conventions
Prerequisite Concepts

In OmniMark, names can consist of the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet ("a" to "z"), the ten digits ("0" to"9"), the punctuation characters (hyphen ("-"), period ("."), and underscore ("_")), and all the characters with numeric values in the range 128 to 255 (that is, the ASCII eight-bit characters). Names must always start with a letter (or one of the ASCII characters from128 to 255).

Names of all OmniMark-defined objects are case insensitive. That is, names that contain lowercase characters are treated as if they were entered in uppercase.

Names of SGML objects, except for entities, are treated as case insensitive by default. These names are also treated as if they were entered in uppercase.

The names of entities are always case sensitive. Entity names which contain the same characters in different cases are treated as different names.

All keywords in OmniMark are treated as case insensitive as well.

The treatment of SGML names is the one specified by the Reference Concrete Syntax. This allows programmers to use the same naming conventions in their programs that are used in the SGML documents being processed.

The treatment of SGML names by OmniMark's built-in SGML parser can be changed by providing an SGML Declaration that specifies different naming conventions. The treatment of SGML names (and OmniMark names) in the program can be changed by adding OmniMark declarations.

The reason that two different mechanisms are required is that there are two different parts of OmniMark involved:

• The built-in SGML parser is responsible for processing SGML input and communicating events to OmniMark. In order to function correctly, it must process the SGML Declaration and behave accordingly.
• The OmniMark language processor is responsible for executing the OmniMark program. Before the program even begins to execute, however, the rules in the program are pre-loaded and arranged for efficient execution. In order to do this, the naming conventions must be understood before the program runs. By the time the SGML Declaration is processed, it is too late.