The lexical structure of a programming language is the set of elementary rules that define what are the tokens or basic atoms of the program. It is the lowest level syntax of a language and specifies what is punctuation, reserved words, identifiers, constants and operators. Some of the basic rules for Java are:
- Java is case sensitive.
- Whitespace, tabs, and newline characters are ignored except when part of string constants. They can be added as needed for readability.
- Comments in java are used for documentation, but they don't change code execution.
- Statements terminate in semicolons! Make sure to always terminate statements with a semicolon.
- Commas are used to separate words in a list
- Round brackets are used for operator precedence and argument lists.
- Square brackets are used for arrays and square bracket notation.
- Curly or brace brackets are used for blocks.
- Keywords are reserved words that have special meanings within the language syntax.
- Identifiers are names for constants, variables, functions, properties, methods and objects. The first character must be a letter, underscore or dollar sign. Following characters can also include digits. Letters are A to Z, a to z, and Unicode characters above hex 00C0. Java styling uses initial capital letter on object identifiers, uppercase for constant ids and lowercase for property, method and variable ids.
Note: an identifier must NOT be any word on the Java Reserved Word List.
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