7.2. Character

A characters is a signed 8-bit value. A character can be represented by an i8 in MLIR.

7.2.1. Declaration

A character value is declared with the keyword character.

7.2.2. Null

null is ASCII NUL ('\0', 0x00) for character.

7.2.3. Identity

identity is ASCII SOH (0x01) for characters. This choice allows the casting of a character to an integer to yield the integer identity.

7.2.4. Literals and Escape Sequences

A character literal is written in the same manner as C99: a single character enclosed in single quotes. You may not use literal newlines. For example:

'a'
'b'
'A'
'1'
'.'
'*'

As in C99, Gazprea supports character escape sequences for common characters. For example:

'\0'
'\n'

The following escape sequences are supported by Gazprea:

Description	Escape Sequence	Value (Hex)
Null	`\0`	`0x00`
Bell	`\a`	`0x07`
Backspace	`\b`	`0x08`
Tab	`\t`	`0x09`
Line Feed	`\n`	`0x0A`
Carriage Return	`\r`	`0x0D`
Quotation Mark	`\"`	`0x22`
Apostrophe	`\'`	`0x27`
Backslash	`\\`	`0x5C`

7.2.5. Operations

The following operations are defined between character values.

Class	Operation	Symbol	Usage	Associativity
Grouping	parentheses	`()`	`(character)`	N/A
Comparison	equals	`==`	`character == character`	left
Comparison	not equals	`!=`	`character != character`	left

Scalar values with type character may be concatenated onto values with type string or vectors with type character.

7.2.6. Type Casting and Type Promotion

To see the types that character may be cast and/or promoted to, see the sections on Type Casting and Type Promotion respectively.