Lexical conventions

This section introduces the fundamental elements of a C++ program. You use these elements, called "lexical elements" or "tokens" to construct statements, definitions, declarations, and so on, which are used to construct complete programs. The following lexical elements are discussed in this section:

• Tokens and character sets
• Comments
• Identifiers
• Keywords
• Punctuators
• Numeric, boolean, and pointer literals
• String and character literals
• User-defined literals

For more information about how C++ source files are parsed, see Phases of translation.

See also

C++ Language Reference
Translation units and linkage