Everywhere else I write a statement in Java I need to end it with a semi-colon. However, that doesn’t apply to the i++ of a for loop.
How comes?
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Everywhere else I write a statement in Java I need to end it with a semi-colon. However, that doesn’t apply to the i++ of a for loop.
How comes?
Because it’s special syntax with clear and agreed-upon semantic meaning interpretable by the compiler, because the designers of C/C++/Java/etc. arbitarily decided it should be so.
EDIT:
Some commenters have pointed out that the decision isn’t really arbitary, since designers did it to maintain consistency with expression vs. statement syntax. I’m glad they pointed that out, because I didn’t know that was the case. In my defense, they very clearly could have made the syntax require a semicolon in that position; the decision not to, while not entirely arbitrarily, represented a choice which could have been different. Ahem.