Question

My wife is working her way through Codecademy (Javascript) and was frustrated by semicolons. She asked me which lines need to end in semicolons. She’s just starting out so I didn’t want to scare here with “statements”, “expressions”, etc. I just told her to not bother with semicolons, it is JS after-all 😉

So how should I have explained it?

Answer 1

1. Semi-colons end each thing.
2. You don’t want it right after if(test) because then it ends that thing (indeed – it’s not invalid, you just really don’t want to end it right there). Likewise with for(a;b;c) (but each thing inside the for is a thing).
3. x = 2 + 1 + 3 + 4 + 5 * 10 + 2; is a single thing, or you wouldn’t have the whole sum. Even over three or four lines, you want it to be a single sum – a single thing.
4. Braces group a few things into one big thing. Since they’re already a thing with an end, they don’t need a semi-colon. But it won’t hurt.