Lexicon 1 Lexicon C, like any language, uses a standard grammar and character set. C compilers interpret source code as a stream of characters from the source file. These characters are grouped into tokens , which can be punctuators, operators, identifiers, keywords, string literals, or constants.
Tokens are the smallest lexical element of the language.
Comments are also considered white space. Section 1.1 lists all the white space characters. An important concept throughout C is the idea of a compilation unit , which is one or more files compiled by the compiler. The ANSI C standard refers to compilation units as translation units . This text treats these terms as equivalent.