Chapter 3. Lexical Structure
Lexicographer: A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge. | ||
| --Samuel Johnson, Dictionary (1755) | ||
This chapter specifies the lexical structure of the Java programming language. Programs are written in Unicode (§3.1), but lexical translations are provided (§3.2) so that Unicode escapes (§3.3) can be used to include any Unicode character using only ASCII characters. Line terminators are defined (§3.4) to support the different conventions of existing host systems while maintaining consistent line numbers.
The Unicode characters resulting from the lexical translations are reduced to a sequence of input elements (§3.5), which are white space (§3.6), comments (§3.7), and tokens. The tokens are the identifiers (§3.8), keywords ...
Get Java™ Language Specification, Third Edition, The now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
