Language Change Specification for Strings From Extended Identifier Proposal

Voting Results: Cast your votes here

Yes:

1. Kevin Jennings - 2016-11-30
2. Martin Thompson - 2016-12-12
3. Thomas Preusser - 2016-12-15
4. Ryan Hinton - 2016-12-19 - ver 1
5. Patrick Lehmann - 2016-12-31 - ver 1
6. Martin Zabel - 2017-01-23 - ver 1

No:

Abstain:

1. Brent Hayhoe - 2017-02-16 Version 1 - Abstain due to lack of personal time for review.

Details of Language Change:

Key:

• Existing LRM text is shown in BLACK font
• Additional LRM text is shown in RED and underlined
• Deleted LRM text is shown in RED with strike-through

LRM 5.7 page 62 (Adobe page 76 of 640) near top

- For a value of an integer type, the abstract literal is a decimal literal and there is no exponent.

- Letters in a basic identifier are in lowercase.

- Characters in an extended identifier include the leading and trailing reverse solidus (backslash). In the case of an extended identifier that has a backslash, the backslash is doubled in the string

Comments

Why are the backslashes included in the representation? It is just a start and end marker for the parser like quotes are start and end markers for a string, but Quotes are never part of the string itself.
Why is the backslash doubled? VHDL doesn't know any escape characters.

-- Patrick Lehmann - 2016-12-09

@Patrick: \name\ is an extended identifier different from name. Including the delimiting backslashes in extended identifiers underlines that they are not aliases. You must also be able to differentiate a backslash within the name from the one terminating the name. Doubling internal ones is an appropriate means that is fully consistent with other such cases in the language such as doubling the quote character within string literals.

-- Thomas Preusser - 2016-12-15