There is no terminator for Embedded SQL/BASIC. Following the end of an Embedded SQL statement in BASIC, only comments and white space (blanks and tabs) are allowed to the end of the line.

The preprocessor allows, but does not require, a semicolon as a statement terminator for Embedded SQL statements. It does not write the semicolon to the output file of BASIC code. The terminating colon can be convenient when entering source code directly from the terminal, using the -s flag on the preprocessor command line to test the syntax of a particular statement (see Advanced Processing in this chapter).