Note: information on this page refers to Ceylon 1.0, not to the current release.

Expression statements

An expression statement simply evaluates an expression.

Usage

An expression statement is just the expression followed by a semicolon (;).

foo();

Description

No all expressions can be treated as statements in this way. For example:

"";

is not a legal expression statement. Since no side-effects result from evaluating a String literal and then discarding it, the statement is useless. Only the following expressions may be used as statements:

• assignment or compound assignment,
• prefix or postfix increment or decrement,
• invocation of a method, or
• instantiation of a class.

On execution, the expression's value is discarded.

See also

• The reference on expressions
• Expression statements in the Ceylon language specification