Glossary

The terms in this glossary have been updated to reflect the changes made in V3.

ABI
The JSON representation of the application binary interface. See the official specification for more information.
Address
A public identifier for an account on a particular chain
Bytecode

The set of EVM instructions as produced by a compiler. Unless otherwise specified this should be assumed to be hexadecimal encoded, representing a whole number of bytes, and prefixed with 0x.

Bytecode can either be linked or unlinked. (see Linking)

Unlinked Bytecode:
 

The hexadecimal representation of a contract’s EVM instructions that contains sections of code that requires linking for the contract to be functional.

The sections of code which are unlinked must be filled in with zero bytes.

Example: 0x606060405260e06000730000000000000000000000000000000000000000634d536f
Linked Bytecode:
 

The hexadecimal representation of a contract’s EVM instructions which has had all Link References replaced with the desired Link Values.

Example: 0x606060405260e06000736fe36000604051602001526040518160e060020a634d536f
Chain Definition

This definition originates from BIP122 URI.

A URI in the format blockchain://<chain_id>/block/<block_hash>

  • chain_id is the unprefixed hexadecimal representation of the genesis hash for the chain.
  • block_hash is the unprefixed hexadecimal representation of the hash of a block on the chain.

A chain is considered to match a chain definition if the the genesis block hash matches the chain_id and the block defined by block_hash can be found on that chain. It is possible for multiple chains to match a single URI, in which case all chains are considered valid matches

Content Addressable URI

Any URI which contains a cryptographic hash which can be used to verify the integrity of the content found at the URI.

The URI format is defined in RFC3986

It is recommended that tools support IPFS and Swarm.

Contract Alias

This is a name used to reference a specific Contract Type. Contract aliases must be unique within a single Package.

The contract alias must use one of the following naming schemes:

  • <contract-name>
  • <contract-name><identifier>

The <contract-name> portion must be the same as the Contract Name for this contract type.

The <identifier> portion must match the regular expression ^[-a-zA-Z0-9]{1,256}$.

Contract Instance

A contract instance a specific deployed version of a Contract Type.

All contract instances have an Address on some specific chain.

Contract Instance Name

A name which refers to a specific Contract Instance on a specific chain from the deployments of a single Package. This name must be unique across all other contract instances for the given chain. The name must conform to the regular expression ^[a-zA-Z_$][a-zA-Z0-9_$]{0,255}$

In cases where there is a single deployed instance of a given Contract Type, package managers should use the Contract Alias for that contract type for this name.

In cases where there are multiple deployed instances of a given contract type, package managers should use a name which provides some added semantic information as to help differentiate the two deployed instances in a meaningful way.

Contract Name

The name found in the source code that defines a specific Contract Type. These names must conform to the regular expression ^[a-zA-Z_$][a-zA-Z0-9_$]{0,255}$.

There can be multiple contracts with the same contract name in a projects source files.

Contract Type

Refers to a specific contract in the package source. This term can be used to refer to an abstract contract, a normal contract, or a library. Two contracts are of the same contract type if they have the same bytecode.

Example:

contract Wallet {
    ...
}

A deployed instance of the Wallet contract would be of of type Wallet.

Identifier

Refers generally to a named entity in the Package.

A string matching the regular expression ^[a-zA-Z][-_a-zA-Z0-9]{0,255}$

A location within a contract’s bytecode which needs to be linked. A link reference has the following properties.

offset:Defines the location within the bytecode where the link reference begins.
length:Defines the length of the reference.
name:(optional.) A string to identify the reference
A link value is the value which can be inserted in place of a Link Reference
Linking
The act of replacing Link References with Link Values within some Bytecode.
Package

Distribution of an application’s source or compiled bytecode along with metadata related to authorship, license, versioning, et al.

For brevity, the term Package is often used metonymously to mean Package Manifest.

Package Manifest
A machine-readable description of a package (See V2 Specification for information about the format for package manifests.)
Prefixed

Bytecode string with leading 0x.

Example:0xdeadbeef
Unprefixed

Not Prefixed.

Example:deadbeef