Atomic Expressions

Atomic expressions turn up in several places in Ginger’s Common syntax. These are places where it is natural to provide a literal value and a general expression might be confusing. To protect against the confusion, expressions are limited to the following forms:

• variables are interpreted as literal symbols.

• literal constants (strings, symbols, characters, numbers).

• Any expression in paretheses, which must return a single value!

A good example is provided by the start tags in Ginger. It is required that attribute values are atomic expressions, for example. This prevents awkward situations like this:

<!-- Wrong! -->
<data flag=x>y> z </data>

<!-- Should be ... -->
<data flag=(x>y)> z </data>

Single Value

Atomic expressions are restricted to return a single value. This affects character constants and expressions in parentheses. So this would not be allowed:

<item chars='abc'/>