.. _section-Compound Terms:

Compound Terms
--------------

So far, all our identifiers (subject, properties, and objects) have been *atomic terms*, such as Greg or child, or q-names, such as eng\_val#Length. However, Flora also supports *compound terms* (also known as *functional terms*) such as f(g(a,b),c), or even f(d)(g(a,b),c) [1]_. These terms add considerable expressive power to the language [2]_, and have several important uses, which we describe next.



.. [1]
   The general form is T(T,...,T), where T is any term. In other words, the top-level function symbol can itself be a compound term. This does not have any great implications in practical terms. It is mostly just a matter of where the parentheses and arguments are placed syntactically.

.. [2]
   which e.g., OWL does not provide