add site
services
publishers
database
health videos
toolbar
stats
live show
health store
more stuff
JOIN/LOGIN
| advertise add site services publishers database health videos
| | about toolbar stats live show health store more stuff JOIN/LOGIN |
The semicolon ( ; ) is a conventional punctuation mark with several uses, mainly for pauses in sentences and breaks in lists. The Italian printer Aldus Manutius the Elder established the practice of using the semicolon mark to separate words of opposed meaning, and to indicate interdependent statements.[1] The earliest, general use of the semicolon in English was in 1591; Ben Jonson was the first notable English writer to use them systematically. The modern uses of the semicolon are discussed below, and relate either to the listing of items, or to the linking of related clauses. Noted punctuation expert Abhijeet Bose once stated that the semicolon was the greatest mark of punctuation to exist.
[edit] English usageSemicolons are followed by a lower case letter, unless that letter is the first letter of a proper noun. They have no spaces before them, but one space after (possibly two in a monospace type). Applications of the semicolon in English include:
[edit] Other languages[edit] ArabicSemicolon in Arabic is called Fāṣila Manqūṭa (Arabic: فاصلة منقوطة) which means literally "a dotted comma", and is written inverted ( ؛ ). In Arabic, the semicolon has several uses:
[edit] Greek and Church SlavonicIn Greek and Church Slavonic, a semicolon indicates a question, similar to a Latin question mark. To indicate a long pause or separate sections, each with commas (the semicolon's purpose in English), Greek uses an interpunct ( · ) and an ano teleia ( · ). Example:
[edit] Computing usageIn computer programming, the semicolon is often used to separate multiple statements (for example, in Perl, Pascal and SQL). In other languages, semicolons are required after every statement (such as in Java, and the C family). Other languages (for instance, some assembly languages and LISP dialects) use semicolons to mark the beginning of comments. Example C++ code: int main(void) { int x, y; x = 1; y = 2; std::cout << x << std::endl; return 0; } In computer systems, the semicolon is represented by Unicode and ASCII character 59 or 0x3B. The EBCDIC semicolon character is 94 or 0x5E. The semicolon is often used to separate elements of a string of text. For example, multiple e-mail addresses in the "To" field in some e-mail clients have to be delimited by a semicolon. The semicolon is commonly used as parts of emoticons, in order to indicate winking. In Microsoft Excel, the semicolon is used as a list separator, especially in cases where the decimal separator is a comma, such as In MATLAB, the semicolon can be used as a row separator when defining a vector or matrix (whereas a comma separates the columns within a row of a vector or matrix) or to execute a command silently, without displaying the resulting output value in the console. In HTML, a semicolon is used to terminate a character entity reference, either named or numeric. [edit] MathematicsIn the argument list of a mathematical function In differential geometry, a semicolon preceding an index is used to indicate the covariant derivative of a function with respect to the coordinate associated with that index. [edit] References
[edit] External links
|
| ↑ top of page ↑ | about thumbshots |
, a semicolon may be used to separate 