This chapter introduces the basic syntactic ingredients of all Maude specifications: identifiers, module names, sort names, and operator declarations. Other syntactic parts of Maude specifications, like equations and rules, will appear in the following chapters.
Some syntax is presented in an informal way by means of general schemes; a formal BNF grammar of the language can be found in Chapter 17.
The chapter finishes explaining some features that can be used to reduce parsing ambiguities in the user-definable syntax, including mixfix operator declarations, supported by Maude.