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6.  Statements

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The simplest C statement is the NULL STATEMENT, a lone semicolon.  This is occasionally used when a loop body does not require any expressions, as shown later in this chapter.  An EXPRESSION STATEMENT is an expression followed by a semicolon:

    2 + 2;        /* useless statement */

Notice that the value of the expression is ignored.  A more useful such statement is one whose expression has a "side effect" like assigning a value or evaluating a function!

    int   a;         /* declaration */
    a = 2 + 2;
    printf("result: %d\n",a);

This chapter begins with a discussion on grouping expression statements and goes on to discuss C's control flow statements for conditional execution and looping.  The            'return' statement to terminate a function was already discussed in Chapter 3.