PROGRAMMING GUIDE
The Exchange API has unique names for basic data types. Here are the basic types from the HOOPS Exchange library: A3DInt8, A3DInt16, A3DInt32, A3DUns8, A3DUns16, A3DUns32, and A3DBool.
The Exchange API declares all non-basic types, which fall into these general categories:
PRC entities: Correspond to the non-terminal structures in the PRC format, such as product occurrences, tessellation base data, and texture transformations. Your software uses NULL pointers to reference PRC entities.
Data structures: Contain the data used to create a PRC entity. Data structures can also receive the data obtained from parsing a PRC entity. There is one data structure for each type of PRC entity.
The HOOPS Exchange API uses a naming convention that is largely self-documenting. The name for each function, structure, enumeration, and enumerator provides clues as to its type, its relationship to a PRC entity described in the PRC format, and its role relative to that PRC entity.
Character encoding is UTF-8, which uses the character encoding scheme described by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) document UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646. That document is available at http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3629.