Talk:Statement (programming)

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I was under the impression that Pascal was defined using lower-case letters for all the keywords. Does anyone know different? If no response within a week, I'll change things to lower-case. Murray Langton 09:35, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Pascal is not case sensitive (although some implementations provide an option to make it so). It is true that most source code + books use lower case. Having written Pascal using a terminal that did not support lower case I don't find reading upper case Pascal a jarring experience. Others might.

Derek farn 19:36, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Most programming languages"

There are a couple of sentences that say "most programming languages", but I don't know that's statistically a true characterization. In fact, I know there are many languages in which those descriptions of statements are false. Unless someone can provide references that support the use of the phrase "most languages", I think they should be replaced with "many" or even "typically". — Chris Page 21:15, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

I guess until somebody actually does the counting we should go with something less emphatic (not that I might have any views one way or the other ;-). Derek farn 22:52, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps a rephrase to "most imperative programming languages" would be appropriate, since this type of language is what the bulk of this article is concerned with. Murray Langton 15:02, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

I would have said that all imperative programming languages have statements. Isn't that one of the things that makes them imperative? On the other hand how many non-imperative language shave statements? I guess it comes down to what the designer of a language decided to call a statement. Could I define a prolog like language and decide to call things that look like clauses statements? Perhaps we need to revisit the definition of statement, I am beginning to think we might need a definition that does encompass a construct that appears in all executable languages. Derek farn 17:38, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Create new statements during program execution?

Defining new statements is possible in Lisp. But you still have to use the list notation for your statements. Languages of the Lisp family have inherited that feature. There are also languages like Seed7 which allow the definition of new statements syntactically and semantically. But what is that: "Snobol4 allows new statements to be created during program execution." I can only speculate about what it means to create a new statement during program execution. Can it be that the new statements are created in the interpreter while it is interpreting the program. In that case the definition of the new statement must be part of the program. Possibly this is a reference to self modifying code. Can somebody give me more information. Zron 14:18, 31 October 2007 (UTC)