AIDDL Files

In the previous section, we assembled AIDDL terms directly in the core libraries. While this is often useful to assemble return values or intermediate structures, we most often want to write models in their own files that can be used by multiple programs.

AIDDL files (ending in .aiddl) consist of a series of entries. Each entry has a type, a name, and a value. The type tells us which subset of the AIDDL is allowed as a value. The name can be used to retrieve the entry in a program or to refer to it in other entries. The value is the actual content of the entry.

In fact, each AIDDL file is a module and its first entry has the form

where #mod is a special type only used in the first entry of a module, self is the self-alias of the module (how it refers to itself) and uri is a globally unique name for the module. No two modules should every use the same name. This allows us to refer to the entries in other modules via reference terms.