Terminator
No statement terminator is required for EQUEL/BASIC statements. It is conventional not to use a statement terminator in EQUEL statements, although the semicolon is allowed at the end of EQUEL statements. The preprocessor ignores it. For example, the following two statements are equivalent:
## sleep 1
and
## sleep 1;
The terminating semicolon may be convenient when entering code directly from the terminal using the
-s flag. For information on using the
-s flag to test the syntax of a particular EQUEL statement, see
Precompiling, Compiling, and Linking an EQUEL Program.
EQUEL statements that are made up of a few other statements, such as a display loop, only allow a semicolon after the last statement. For example:
## display empform ! no semicolon here
## initialize ! no semicolon here
## activate menuitem "help" ! no semicolon here
## {
## message "No help yet"; ! semicolon allowed
## sleep 2; ! semicolon allowed
## }
## finalize; ! Semicolon allowed on last statement
Variable declarations made visible to EQUEL observe the normal BASIC declaration syntax. Thus, variable declarations should not be terminated with a semicolon.