Keywords

Programming languages are usually based on an actual language. Crazy, I know. If it's created by English-speaking individual or team, it's likely going to be using English words.

Some words may be reserved for specific use within a language. For example, a language may use the word quit as a way to stop the program. These words are called keywords and we use them to communicate with the computer through a particular language.

Imagine we create a programming language whose sole use is to move through a maze. We may reserve words like up, down, left, and right as those are the ones we would need for our purposes. If we want to be able to restart the maze, we may also reserve the word restart.

Operators

Similar to keywords, we may also reserve symbols to mean specific things too.

Most languages supports the basic arithmetic operators like + for addition, - for subtraction, * for multiplication, and / for division.

Separators

We all need space.

In the English language, space is a way to separate words because words are how we communicate and a collection of it in a particular order is how we understand what someone is saying.

In programming languages, we usually use space to separate keywords. But we face a problem when a keyword contains more than one word. If we separate it with a space, the computer would likely treat the words as separate keywords. This is when case styles come into place which we'll save for another page. For now, just know that keywords are likely not going to be space-seperated in programming languages.