Types and Tags

 

The name for data types is usually a sequence of uppercase letters, where each letter is the initial letter of a word in the description of the data type.

Example:

The data type of rational numbers is by this rule abbreviated to RN.

If a reasonable description of the data type can be given by only one word then the name of the data type is a capitalized abbreviation of this word.

Example:

The data type representing monomials is called Mon.

According to our ``Simulated Package Principle''  (see Section 2) each function name has to carry a tag  that identifies for which data domain the function can be applied. This tag corresponds to the name of the data type but is lowercase.

Example:

The tags for functions for rational numbers and monomials are rn and mon respectively.