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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.
Last modified date: 01/30/2023