Thursday, April 21, 2011

Lexical Structure in java

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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Chitika