At the lowest level, YODL's lexical scanner returns small pieces of
information to its parser. These pieces of information are called em(tokens),
and consist of elements like a blank space, a non-blank character, or an
end-of-ile flag. These tokens are at too small an aggregation level to be
useful for the current user-guide, so here we concentrate our discussion 
on the next aggregation level: compound elements and conceptual elements. 

Compound elements relate to the basic tokens as words in a sentence to the
individual letters of the words. These compound elements are identifiers,
names, numbers, parameter lists and arguments.

Conceptual elements are found at the next higher aggregation levels:
em(builtin functions) are the buildin blocks for all of YODL's functionality,
em(symbols) and em(counters) are YODL's em(variables), and (user defined)
em(macros) extend YODL's functionality beyond those of the basic builtin
functions.

In the coming sections these basic and conceptual elements are discussed in
greater detail.
