In computer programming, a statement block (or code block) is a section of code which is grouped together, much like a paragraph; such blocks consist of one, or more, statements. Statement blocks help make code more readable by breaking up programs into logical work units. Computer programming (often simply programming or coding) is the craft of writing a set of commands or instructions that can later be compiled and/or interpreted and then inherently transformed to an executable that an electronic machine can execute or run. Programming requires mainly logic, but has elements of science... Source code (commonly just source or code) is any series of statements written in some human-readable computer programming language. ... A pilcrow is used to indicate a paragraph. ... A statement is the minimal unit of structuring in imperative programming languages. ...

In C, C++, Java and some other languages, statement blocks are enclosed by braces {}. In Ada, Pascal, and some other languages, blocks are denoted by "begin" and "end" statements. In Python they are indicated by indentation (the Off-side rule). Unlike paragraphs, statement blocks can be nested; that is, with one block inside another. Blocks often define the scope of the identifiers used within. C is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system. ... C++ (generally pronounced /si plʌs plʌs/) is a general-purpose, high-level programming language with low-level facilities. ... Java is an object-oriented programming language developed by James Gosling and colleagues at Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. ... Various brackets in Arial // In writing Brackets are punctuation marks, used in pairs to set apart or interject text within other text. ... Ada is a structured, statically typed imperative computer programming language designed by a team led by Jean Ichbiah of CII Honeywell Bull during 1977–1983. ... Pascal is an imperative computer programming language, developed in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a language particularly suitable for structured programming. ... Python is an interpreted programming language created by Guido van Rossum in 1990. ... A computer programming language is said to adhere to the off-side rule if in it the scope of declarations (a block) is expressed by their indentation, i. ... In computer programming in general, a scope is an enclosing context. ...

Blocks often have subtle but important differences in semantics. In languages in the C tradition, they define identifier scope. In C++ they can be used to define object lifetime (creation and destruction). In some languages (such as Pico) they are merely used for grouping expressions without notions of variable scope. In languages such as Smalltalk, blocks are objects in their own right, extended with a reference to their environment of definition, i.e. closures. Pico is a programming language developed at the PROG lab at the Dutch-speaking Free University of Brussels (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, VUB). ... Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. ... In programming languages, a closure is a function that refers to free variables in its lexical context. ...

A typical statement block

 int main() { return 0; } 

A nested statement block

 int main() { int x=1; if (x == 1) { x++; } return 0; } 

See Also

• Structured programming
• Closure (computer science)