Java applications evaluate expressions in the context of statements, which are standalone islands of code that accomplish various tasks such as declaring a variable, making a decision, or iterating over statements. A statement can be expressed as a simple statement or as a compound statement:
- A simple statement is a single standalone instruction for performing a task; it must be terminated with a semicolon character (
;). - A compound statement is a sequence of simple and other compound statements located between open- and close-brace characters (
{and}), which delimit the compound statement’s boundaries. Compound statements can be empty, will appear wherever simple statements appear, and are alternatively known as blocks. A compound statement is not terminated with a semicolon.
In this article I introduce you to using statements in your Java programs. You can use statements to declare variables and specify expressions, make decisions, iterate over statements (yes, you can use statements to iterate over statements), break and continue iteration, and do nothing. I’ll leave some of the more exotic statements (such as statements for returning values from called methods and for throwing exceptions) for a future Java 101 article.
