The primary way of identifying an HDS object is by its name, which must be unique within its own container object. The name of an object is a character string which may contain any printing characters; white space is ignored and alphabetic characters are capitalised. The maximum length of an HDS name is 15 characters.
There are no special rules governing the first character (i.e. it can be numeric), so HDS itself allows great freedom in specifying names (and also types - see below). In practice, however, some restrictions will be imposed by considerations of portability of data and applications, and of possible syntax conflicts with the environment within which HDS is used.
HDS Hierarchical Data System