2. Lexical Structure
2.1 Programs
A C# program consists of one or more source files, known formally as compilation units (§9.1). A source file is an ordered sequence of Unicode characters. Source files typically have a one-to-one correspondence with files in a file system, but this correspondence is not required. For maximal portability, it is recommended that files in a file system be encoded with the UTF-8 encoding.
Conceptually speaking, a program is compiled using three steps:
1. Transformation, which converts a file from a particular character repertoire and encoding scheme into a sequence of Unicode characters
2. Lexical analysis, which translates a stream of Unicode input characters into a stream of tokens
3. Syntactic analysis, ...
Get The C# Programming Language, Third Edition 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.