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: 08/28/2024