7.3 Names

Identifiers are used to give names to several classes of languageobjects and refer to these objects by name later:

• value names (syntactic class value-name),
• value constructors and exception constructors (class constr-name),
• labels (label-name, defined in section 7.1),
• polymorphic variant tags (tag-name),
• type constructors (typeconstr-name),
• record fields (field-name),
• class names (class-name),
• method names (method-name),
• instance variable names (inst-var-name),
• module names (module-name),
• module type names (modtype-name). These eleven name spaces are distinguished both by the context and by thecapitalization of the identifier: whether the first letter of theidentifier is in lowercase (written lowercase-ident below) or inuppercase (written capitalized-ident). Underscore is considered alowercase letter for this purpose.

Naming objects

See also the following language extension:extended indexing operators.

As shown above, prefix and infix symbols as well as some keywords canbe used as value names, provided they are written between parentheses.The capitalization rules are summarized in the table below.

Note on polymorphic variant tags: the current implementation acceptslowercase variant tags in addition to capitalized variant tags, but wesuggest you avoid lowercase variant tags for portability andcompatibility with future OCaml versions.

Referring to named objects

A named object can be referred to either by its name (following theusual static scoping rules for names) or by an access path prefix. name,where prefix designates a module and name is the name of an objectdefined in that module. The first component of the path, prefix, iseither a simple module name or an access path name₁. name₂ …,in case the defining module is itself nested inside other modules.For referring to type constructors, module types, or class types,the prefix canalso contain simple functor applications (as in the syntactic classextended-module-path above) in case the defining module is theresult of a functor application.

Label names, tag names, method names and instance variable names neednot be qualified: the former three are global labels, while the latterare local to a class.