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THE Java™ Programming Language, Fourth Edition
book

THE Java™ Programming Language, Fourth Edition

by Ken Arnold, James Gosling, David Holmes
August 2005
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
928 pages
20h 39m
English
Addison-Wesley Professional
Content preview from THE Java™ Programming Language, Fourth Edition

Chapter 7. Tokens, Values, and Variables

 

There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.

 
 --Johann Sebastian Bach

A program starts as a sequence of characters contained in a file—the source code. Interpreting those characters, according to the rules of a given language, is the job of the compiler, or interpreter. Some characters will represent the names of variables, others will be special keywords used by the language, still others will be operators or “punctuation” characters used to separate the other elements. All of these textual constructs form the lexical elements of the program. These lexical elements must be identified as keywords, comments, literals, variables, ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0321349806Purchase book