Keywords are reserved in CDL files.

[DennisHeimbigner]

re: e-support ticket BNL-694121
There is an ambiguity in the grammar for cdl files.

Consider this CDL file fragment:

netcdf X {
variables:
int data;:

data:_Fillvalue = ...

The last line is ambiguous because it can be interpreted as the beginning
of the data: section. If you remove that line, thecdl file
compiles ok. This is going to be difficult to fix (maybe impossible)
because it can require significant lookahead.
It appears that this is only a problem for variables named 'data' or 'group'.

[DennisHeimbigner]

Ok, so I had this wrong. ncgen handles this ok, as per this comment in the ncgen man page.

Note also that the words variable',dimension', data',group', and
`types' are legal CDL names, but be careful that there is a space be-
tween them and any following colon character when used as a variable
name. This is mostly an issue with attribute declarations.

However, ncdump does not obey this rule. So that needs to be fixed.

[DennisHeimbigner]

Ok, so the fix is in as a pull request. Closing issue.