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 chapter.
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 Chapter 4, 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. See The goto and Labeled Statements for more information.