carbon-lang/docs/design/lexical_conventions

Lexical conventions

Table of contents

• TODO
• Lexical elements

TODO

This is a skeletal design, added to support the overview. It should not be treated as accepted by the core team; rather, it is a placeholder until we have more time to examine this detail. Please feel welcome to rewrite and update as appropriate.

See PR 17 for context -- that proposal may replace this.

Lexical elements

The first stage of processing a source file is the division of the source file into lexical elements.

A lexical element is one of the following:

• a maximal sequence of whitespace characters
• a word
• a literal:
  • a numeric literal
  • TODO: string literals
• TODO: operators, comments, ...

The sequence of lexical elements is formed by repeatedly removing the longest initial sequence of characters that forms a valid lexical element.