6.1 | Lexical conventions

Blanks

The following characters are considered as blanks: space, newline, horizontal tabulation, carriage return, line feed and form feed. Blanks are ignored, but they separate adjacent identifiers, literals and keywords that would otherwise be confused as one single identifier, literal or keyword.

Comments

Comments are introduced by the two characters `(*`, with no intervening blanks, and terminated by the characters `*)`, with no intervening blanks. Comments are treated as blank characters. Comments do not occur inside string or character literals. Nested comments are handled correctly.

Identifiers

`ident` | ::= | (`letter`| `_`) { `letter`| `0`...`9`| `_`| `'` }
`letter` | ::= | `A` ... `Z` | `a` ... `z`

Identifiers are sequences of letters, digits, `_` (the underscore character), and `'` (the single quote), starting with a letter or an underscore. Letters contain at least the 52 lowercase and uppercase letters from the ASCII set. The current implementation (except on MacOS) also recognizes as letters all accented characters from the ISO 8859-1 (``ISO Latin 1'') set. All characters in an identifier are meaningful. The current implementation places no limits on the number of characters of an identifier.

Integer literals

`integer-literal` | ::= | [`-`] { `0`...`9` }+
| | | [`-`] (`0x`| `0X`) { `0`...`9`| `A`...`F`| `a`...`f` }+
| | | [`-`] (`0o`| `0O`) { `0`...`7` }+
| | | [`-`] (`0b`| `0B`) { `0`...`1` }+

An integer literal is a sequence of one or more digits, optionally preceded by a minus sign. By default, integer literals are in decimal (radix 10). The following prefixes select a different radix:

Prefix | Radix
`0x`, `0X` | hexadecimal (radix 16)
`0o`, `0O` | octal (radix 8)
`0b`, `0B` | binary (radix 2)

(The initial `0` is the digit zero; the `O` for octal is the letter O.) The interpretation of integer literals that fall outside the range of representable integer values is undefined.

Floating-point literals

`float-literal` | ::= | [`-`] { `0`...`9` }+ [`.` { `0`...`9` }] [(`e`| `E`) [`+`| `-`] { `0`...`9` }+]

Floating-point decimals consist in an integer part, a decimal part and an exponent part. The integer part is a sequence of one or more digits, optionally preceded by a minus sign. The decimal part is a decimal point followed by zero, one or more digits. The exponent part is the character `e` or `E` followed by an optional `+` or `-` sign, followed by one or more digits. The decimal part or the exponent part can be omitted, but not both to avoid ambiguity with integer literals. The interpretation of floating-point literals that fall outside the range of representable floating-point values is undefined.

Character literals

`char-literal` | ::= | `'` `regular-char` `'`
| | | `'` `escape-sequence` `'`
`escape-sequence` | ::= | `\` (`\` | `"` | `'` | `n` | `t` | `b` | `r`)
| | | `\` (`0`...`9`) (`0`...`9`) (`0`...`9`)

Character literals are delimited by `'` (single quote) characters. The two single quotes enclose either one character different from `'` and `\`, or one of the escape sequences below:

Sequence | Character denoted
`\\` | backslash (`\`)
`\"` | double quote (`"`)
`\'` | single quote (`'`)
`\n` | linefeed (LF)
`\r` | carriage return (CR)
`\t` | horizontal tabulation (TAB)
`\b` | backspace (BS)
`\`ddd | the character with ASCII code ddd in decimal

String literals

`string-literal` | ::= | `"` { `string-character` } `"`
`string-character` | ::= | `regular-char-str`
| | | `escape-sequence`

String literals are delimited by `"` (double quote) characters. The two double quotes enclose a sequence of either characters different from `"` and `\`, or escape sequences from the table given above for character literals.
To allow splitting long string literals across lines, the sequence `\`newline blanks (a `\` at end-of-line followed by any number of blanks at the beginning of the next line) is ignored inside string literals.
The current implementation places practically no restrictions on the length of string literals.

Naming labels

To avoid ambiguities, naming labels cannot just be defined syntactically as the sequence of the three tokens `~`, `ident` and `:`, and have to be defined at the lexical level.

`label` | ::= | `~` (`a` ... `z`) { `letter`| `0`...`9`| `_`| `'` } `:`
`optlabel` | ::= | `?` (`a` ... `z`) { `letter`| `0`...`9`| `_`| `'` } `:`

Naming labels come in two flavours: `label` for normal arguments and `optlabel` for optional ones. They are simply distinguished by their first character, either `~` or `?`.

Prefix and infix symbols

`infix-symbol` | ::= | (`=` | `<` | `>` | `@` | `^` | `|` | `&` | `+` | `-` | `*` | `/` | `$` | `%`) { `operator-char` }
`prefix-symbol` | ::= | (`!` | `?` | `~`) { `operator-char` }
`operator-char` | ::= | `!` | `$` | `%` | `&` | `*` | `+` | `-` | `.` | `/` | `:` | `<` | `=` | `>` | `?` | `@` | `^` | `|` | `~`

Sequences of ``operator characters'', such as `<=>` or `!!`, are read as a single token from the `infix-symbol` or `prefix-symbol` class. These symbols are parsed as prefix and infix operators inside expressions, but otherwise behave much as identifiers.

Keywords

The identifiers below are reserved as keywords, and cannot be employed otherwise:

          and         as          assert      asr         begin       class
          closed      constraint  do          done        downto      else
          end         exception   external    false       for         fun
          function    functor     if          in          include     inherit
          land        lazy        let         lor         lsl         lsr
          lxor        match       method      mod         module      mutable
          new         of          open        or          parser      private
          rec         sig         struct      then        to          true
          try         type        val         virtual     when        while
          with

The following character sequences are also keywords:

        #     &     '     (     )     *     ,     ->    ?
        ??    .     ..    .(    .[    :     ::    :=    ;
        ;;    <-    =     [     [|    [<    {<    ]     |]
        >]    >}    _     `     {     |     }     ~

Ambiguities

Lexical ambiguities are resolved according to the ``longest match'' rule: when a character sequence can be decomposed into two tokens in several different ways, the decomposition retained is the one with the longest first token.

Line number directives

`linenum-directive` | ::= | `#` {`0` ... `9`}+
| | | `#` {`0` ... `9`}+ `"` { `string-character` } `"`

Preprocessors that generate Caml source code can insert line number directives in their output so that error messages produced by the compiler contain line numbers and file names referring to the source file before preprocessing, instead of after preprocessing. A line number directive is composed of a `#` (sharp sign), followed by a positive integer (the source line number), optionally followed by a character string (the source file name). Line number directives are treated as blank characters during lexical analysis.