2. Basic Specification Layout
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## 2. Basic Specification Layout

A SLEIGH specification is typically contained in a single file, although see Section 3.1, “Including Files”. The file must follow a specific format as parsed by the SLEIGH compiler. In this section, we list the basic formatting rules for this file as enforced by the compiler.

### 2.1. Comments

Comments start with the ‘#’ character and continue to the end of the line. Comments can appear anywhere except the display section of a constructor (see Section 7.3, “The Display Section”) where the ‘#’ character will be interpreted as something that should be printed in disassembly.

### 2.2. Identifiers

Identifiers are made up of letters a-z, capitals A-Z, digits 0-9 and the characters ‘.’ and ‘_’. An identifier can use these characters in any order and for any length, but it must not start with a digit.

### 2.3. Strings

String literals can be used, when specifying names and when specifying how disassembly should be printed, so that special characters are treated as literals. Strings are surrounded by the double quote character ‘”’ and all characters in between lose their special meaning.

### 2.4. Integers

Integers are specified either in a decimal format or in a standard C-style hexadecimal format by prepending the number with “0x”. Alternately, a binary representation of an integer can be given by prepending the string of '0' and '1' characters with "0b".

    1006789
    0xF5CC5
    0xf5cc5
    0b11110101110011000101

Numbers are treated as unsigned except when used in patterns where they are treated as signed (see Section 7.4, “The Bit Pattern Section”). The number of bytes used to encode the integer when specifying the semantics of an instruction is inferred from other parts of the syntax (see Section 7.3, “The Display Section”). Otherwise, integers should be thought of as having arbitrary precision. Currently, SLEIGH stores integers internally with 64 bits of precision.

### 2.5. White Space

White space characters include space, tab, line-feed, vertical line-feed, and carriage-return (‘ ‘, ‘\t’, ‘\r’, ‘\v’, ‘\n’). Variations in spacing have no effect on the parsing of the file except in string literals.

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