C++ was developed in the early 1980s by Bjarne Stroustrup at AT&T Bell Laboratories as an incremental improvement to the C language. The smallest individual unit in a program is called a token or lexical unit, which includes keywords, identifiers, literals, punctuators, and operators. Keywords are reserved words that identify syntactic forms, identifiers name entities, literals represent fixed values, punctuators have syntactic and semantic meaning, and operators trigger computations in expressions.