--- title: "Lexical Conventions | Microsoft Docs" ms.custom: "" ms.date: "11/04/2016" ms.reviewer: "" ms.suite: "" ms.technology: - "cpp-language" ms.tgt_pltfrm: "" ms.topic: "index-page " dev_langs: - "C++" helpviewer_keywords: - "lexical conventions" - "conventions, lexical" ms.assetid: 03f9efff-bb95-45ef-9157-0a3fac809ccf caps.latest.revision: 10 author: "mikeblome" ms.author: "mblome" manager: "ghogen" translation.priority.ht: - "de-de" - "es-es" - "fr-fr" - "it-it" - "ja-jp" - "ko-kr" - "ru-ru" - "zh-cn" - "zh-tw" translation.priority.mt: - "cs-cz" - "pl-pl" - "pt-br" - "tr-tr" --- # Lexical Conventions This section introduces the fundamental elements of a C++ program. You use these elements, called "lexical elements" or "tokens" to construct statements, definitions, declarations, and so on, which are used to construct complete programs. The following lexical elements are discussed in this section: - [Character Sets](../cpp/character-sets2.md) - [Tokens](../cpp/tokens-cpp.md) - [Comments](../cpp/comments-cpp.md) - [Identifiers](../cpp/identifiers-cpp.md) - [Keywords](../cpp/keywords-cpp.md) - [Punctuators](../cpp/punctuators-cpp.md) - [Numeric, Boolean, and Pointer Literals](../cpp/numeric-boolean-and-pointer-literals-cpp.md) - [String and Character Literals](../cpp/string-and-character-literals-cpp.md) - [User-Defined Literals](../cpp/user-defined-literals-cpp.md) This section also has an [Overview of File Translation](../cpp/cpp-built-in-operators-precedence-and-associativity.md) topic. ## See Also [C++ Language Reference](../cpp/cpp-language-reference.md)