Notation and Syntax

 

The CML syntax is based on the Common Lisp standard [11]; a sequence of characters is a legal CML expression only if it is acceptable to the Common Lisp reader with standard settings.

See section , page  for the syntax of atomic sentences in CML. See section , page  for a concise syntax of all of the top level forms in the language.

In the definitions of the top level forms, elements of axiom schema that are extracted from the syntactic specification of a form are given in this font.

Where the syntax allows for a finite series of items indexed from 1 to n, the first item of the sequence is given with the subscript 1 and the remaining n-1 items are abbreviated by `'. For example,

((participant :type type) )

is the notation for

((participant :type type) ... (participant :type type))

In CML, variables are marked with a ``?'' prefix, to distinguish them from object and relation constants.