Overview of C Statements

C statements consist of tokens, expressions, and other statements. A statement that forms a component of another statement is called the "body" of the enclosing statement. Each statement type given by the following syntax is discussed in this section.

Syntax

statement:
 labeled-statement
 compound-statement
 expression-statement
 selection-statement
 iteration-statement
 jump-statement
 try-except-statement /* Microsoft-specific */
 try-finally-statement /* Microsoft-specific */

Frequently the statement body is a "compound statement." A compound statement consists of other statements that can include keywords. The compound statement is delimited by braces ({ }). All other C statements end with a semicolon (;). The semicolon is a statement terminator.

The expression statement contains a C expression that can contain the arithmetic or logical operators introduced in Expressions and Assignments. The null statement is an empty statement.

Any C statement can begin with an identifying label consisting of a name and a colon. Since only the goto statement recognizes statement labels, statement labels are discussed with goto. For more information, see The goto and Labeled Statements.

See also

Statements