Comparison of Programming Languages (syntax) - Blocks

Blocks

A block is a notation for a group of two or more statements, expressions or other units of code that are related in such a way as to comprise a whole.

Braces (aka Curly brackets) { ... }:

  • Curly bracket programming languages: C, C++, Objective-C, Go, Java, JavaScript, ECMAScript, C#, D, Perl, PHP (for & loop loops, or pass a block as argument), Scala, S-Lang, Windows PowerShell, Haskell (in do-notation)

Parentheses ( ... )

  • OCaml, Standard ML

Brackets

  • Smalltalk (blocks are first class objects. aka closures)

begin ... end:

  • Ada, ALGOL, Pascal, Ruby (for, do/while & do/until loops), OCaml, Simula, Erlang.

do ... done:

  • Visual Basic, Fortran, TUTOR (with mandatory indenting of block body), Visual Prolog

do ... end

  • Lua, Ruby (pass blocks as arguments, for loop)

X ... end (e.g. if ... end):

  • Bash (for & while loops), Ruby (if, while, until, def, class, module statements), OCaml (for & while loops), MATLAB (if & switch conditionals, for & while loops, try clause, package, classdef, properties, methods, events, & function blocks), Lua (then / else & function)

(begin ...):

  • Scheme

(progn ...):

  • Lisp

(do ...):

  • Clojure

Indentation

  • Off-side rule languages: Cobra, Haskell (in do-notation when braces are omitted), occam, Python

Others

  • Bash, sh, and ksh: if ... fi, do ... done, case ... esac;
  • ALGOL 68: begin ... end, ( ... ), if ... fi, do ... od
  • Lua: repeat ... until
  • COBOL: IF ... END-IF, PERFORM ... END-PERFORM

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