A dot gen specification consists of one or more statements. Statements are either data types definitions, via IDL statements, or specific genom statements. cpp directives (see Preprocessing) are handled at the lexical level and do not appear in the grammar.

IDL statements define types, constants or IDL modules containing types and constants. The syntax follows closely the subset the 'OMG IDL' specification corresponding to type and constants definitions (see Chapter 7 of the CORBA specification, Object Management Group, version 3.1. Part I: CORBA interfaces). Note that this subset of the dogten grammar is not in any manner tied to OMG IDL and may diverge from future OMG specifications.

A genom statement defines components or interfaces.