Curly bracket programming language

Curly brace or bracket programming languages are those which use balanced brackets ({ and }, also known as "brace brackets" or simply "braces") to make blocks in their syntax or formal grammar, mainly due to being C-influenced.

Statements and blocks

The name derives from the common syntax of the languages, where blocks of statements are enclosed in curly brackets. For example (using BSD/Allman indent style, one of many stylistic ways to format a program):

for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
   printf("%d", i);
   doTask(i);
}

Languages in this family are sometimes referred to as C-style, because they tend to have syntax that is strongly influenced by C syntax. Beside the curly brackets, they often inherit other syntactic features, such as using the semicolon as a statement terminator (not as a separator), and the three-part "for" statement syntax as shown above.

Generally, these languages are also considered "free-form languages", meaning that the compiler considers all whitespace to be the same as one blank space, much like HTML. Considering that, the above code could be written:

for(int i=0;i<10;i++){printf("%d",i);doTask(i);}

but this is not recommended, as it becomes nearly impossible for a person to read after the program grows beyond a few statements.

There are many other ways to identify statement blocks, such as ending keywords that may match beginning keywords (in Ada, Pascal, REXX, and Visual Basic), the Off-side rule of indentation (in Python), or other symbols such as parentheses (in Lisp).

Loops

In C, C++, and Java:

while (Boolean expression) {
    statement(s)
}

do {
    statement(s)
} while (Boolean expression);

for (initialisation; termination condition; incrementing expr) {
    statement(s)
}

Conditional statements

In C, C++, and Java:

if (Boolean expression)
{
    statement(s)
}

if (Boolean expression)
{
    statement(s)
} 
else
{
    statement(s)
}

if (Boolean expression)
{
    statement(s)
} 
else if (Boolean expression)
{
    statement (s)
}
...
else
{
    statement(s)
}

switch (integer expression)
{
    case constant integer expr:
         statement(s)
         break;
    ...
    default:
         statement(s)
         break;
}

In Ruby:

if expression then
   statement(s)
end

Exception handling

In C# and Java:

try
{
    statement(s)
}
catch (exception type)
{
    statement(s)
}
catch (exception type)
{
    statement(s)
}
finally
{
    statement(s)
}

C++ does not have finally, but otherwise looks similar. C has nothing like this, though some compilers vendors added the keywords __try and __finally to their implementation.

Languages

• ABCL/c+
• C - developed circa 1970 at Bell Labs
• C++
• C#
• Ch - embeddable C/C++ interpreter
• Cilk - concurrent C for multithreaded parallel programming
• Coyote - C variant intended to lower the likelihood of some common errors, e.g., buffer overflows
• Cyclone - C variant
• D - C/C++ variant
• DINO
• E
• ECMAScript a.k.a. ActionScript, DMDScript, JavaScript, JScript
• Frink
• Java
• Perl
• PHP
• Pico
• Pike
• The Unix shells: AWK, C shell (csh)
• UnrealScript