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Terminator
No statement terminator is required for EQUEL/Pascal statements. It is conventional not to use a statement terminator in EQUEL statements, although the Pascal statement terminator, 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 }
##  begin
##     message 'No help yet';  { semicolon allowed }
##     sleep 2;                { semicolon allowed }
##  end
##  finalize;                  { semicolon allowed on last statement }
Variable declarations made visible to EQUEL observe the normal Pascal declaration syntax. Thus, variable declarations must be terminated in the normal way for Pascal, with a semicolon.
Last modified date: 01/30/2023