Glossary of keywords & conventions
This page is responsible for some of the most common development and blockchain terms and the conventions to follow onchain or with interactions.
Glossary#
nonce
An incrementing integer counter, safeguards from transactions being sent twice. The term stands for "number used once".
gas price
The amount paid for a unit of gas.
gas limit
The amount of gas should be expended before erroring.
signature
Cryptographic hash of some data generated using a keypair.
QA
1 Unit of QA is worth 0.000001 LI and 0.000000000001 ZIL.
QA is used when speaking about small values. Default Scilla unit that can be represented as a Uint128.
LI
1 unit of LI is worth 1000000 QA and 0.000001 ZIL.
LI is rarely used as a unit.
ZIL
1 unit of ZIL is worth 1000000 LI and 1000000000000 QA.
ZIL is used when speaking about large values.
Keywords#
accept
Accepts an amount of ZIL into the contract.
_sender
The address calling the contract.
_origin
The original address that started the chain of calling.
_this_address
Starts a pattern matching block
in
Used to chain a logical structure through multiple variables.
Conventions#
The standard convention to writing procedure names is in PascalCase.
The standard convention to writing constants and variables is in snake_case.
Conventional transition names#
ZRC-5 - convention for depositing zil#
For a smart contract to accept incoming ZIL, it needs to do so explicitly using the accept statement. As such, any transition that does not have the accept statement will not be able to accept any incoming ZIL transfer.
However, there is currently no naming convention for transitions that can accept ZIL. As a result, cryptocurrency exchanges or cryptocurrency wallet providers do not know which _tag to set, should they wish to transfer ZIL to a contract address.
By having a naming convention for transitions that can accept ZIL, one can easily transfer ZIL to a contract that follows this convention, thereby improving composability between multiple contracts.
(* Accepts funds *)transition AddFunds () acceptend