Curly bracket programming language: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 10:51, 6 December 2006

Revision as of 02:50, 10 December 2006

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'''Curly brace''' or '''bracket''' [[programming language]]s are those which use [[balance]]d [[bracket]]s ('''{''' and '''}''', also known as "brace brackets" or simply "braces") to make [[block (programming)|block]]s in their [[syntax]] or [[formal grammar]], mainly due to being [[C (programming language)|C]]-influenced.

== History ==

Curly-bracket syntax pre-dates C. [[BCPL]] was the first language to use curly brackets to outline multi-statement function bodies. [[Ken Thompson]] used the feature in his [[B programming language]]. Because [[C (programming language)|C]] was initially designed after B, it has retained the bracket syntax of B, as have many subsequent languages ([[C++]], [[Java (programming language)|Java]], [[JavaScript]] and its generalized standard [[ECMAScript]], [[C Sharp|C#]], [[D (programming language)|D]], etc.). [[Pico programming language|Pico]] is a non-C descendant that also uses this style.

One common part of curly bracket style is the common style of terminating a statement with a semicolon (;), which is one way for languages to ignore whitespace. BCPL and Pico, do not have this rule. Thus a newline is used as a statement terminator in such languages. The [[Indent_style#Pico_style|Pico indent style]] is then used, as below (BCPL):

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*[[AutoHotkey]]

*[[AWK programming language|AWK]]

*[[C (programming language)|C]] - developed circa 1970 at [[Bell Labs]]

*[[C shell]] (csh)

*[[C++]]