❖ In a passage of text, individual words and punctuation
marks are called tokens. Similarly, in C programming the
smallest individual units are known as C tokens.
❖ C language has six types of tokens, and programs are
written using these tokens and the syntax of the
language.
Keywords Identifiers Constants Strings Special Operators
Symbols
✔Keywords serves as the building blocks for a program statements. All
keywords have a fixed meaning and cannot be changed.
✔ Keywords cannot be used as normal identifier names.
✔ Few Examples of keywords used in C are listed below
❑ int
❑ break
❑ goto
❑ char
❑ switch
❑ void
✔Identifier refers to the name of variables, functions and arrays. These are
user defined names and consists of a sequence of letters and digits.
✔ Both uppercase and lowercase letters can be used, and c language is case
sensitive. A special symbol underscore ( _ ) is also permitted.
✔ Rules For Identifiers
❖ First character must be an alphabet.
❖ must consist of only letters, digits or underscore.
❖ Should not be a keyword and should not have any blank space.
✔ Example:- int num;
char name;
Where num and name are identifier names.
✔Constants refers to fixed values that do not change during the execution of a
program.
✔ Basic types of C constants are shown in the flowchart
Constants
Numeric Character
Constants Constants
Single
Integer Real character String
Constants Constants constants constants
✔Strings are nothing but array of characters ended with null character (‘\0’).
This null character indicates the end of the string.
✔ Strings are always enclosed by double quotes. Whereas, character is
enclosed by single quotes in C.
✔ Example :- char name[10];
In this example the variable name can store up to 10 bytes.
✔The following special symbols are used in C having some special meaning
and thus, cannot be used for some other purpose.
[] () {} , ; : * … = #
Braces{}: These opening and ending curly braces marks the start and end of
a block of code containing more than one executable statement.
Parentheses(): These special symbols are used to indicate function calls and
function parameters.
Brackets[]: Opening and closing brackets are used as array element
reference. These indicate single and multidimensional subscripts.
✔The symbols which are used to perform logical and mathematical
operations in a C program are called C operators.
✔ Operators used in C program are
Arithmetic operators
Assignment operators
Relational operators
Logical operators
Bit wise operators
Conditional operators (ternary operators)
Increment/decrement operators
Special Operators
