I am reading Programming Language Pragmatics by Michael Scott. He says that on a first pass, a compiler will break a program into a series of tokens. He says that it will check for malformed tokens, like 123abc or $@foo (in C).
What is a malformed token? A variable that does not meet the rules of variable-naming? An operator that does not exist (ex. "<-")?
Is this analogous to a misspelled word?