"Command" is a better term for what we call "statements" in imperative programming languages. "Statement" in this context is an unfortunate historical term; except in Prolog, these "statements" don't have a truth-value, just an effect. (And in Prolog we call them "clauses" instead.)
In many early computer programming documents the term "order" was used instead of "statement", where "order" was meant as a synonym for "command" and not as referring to the ordering of a sequence.
Yes, but that is mostly because in the first few years (including by the time of Mauchly), there were no "high-level" programming languages, so the "orders" composing the text of a program corresponded to instructions directly executable by the machine.
I believe that the term "statement" has been imposed by the IBM publications about FORTRAN, starting in 1956.
Before the first public documents about IBM FORTRAN, the first internal document about FORTRAN, from 1954, had used the terms "formula" for anything that later would be called "executable statement", i.e. for many things that would not have been called formulas either before or after that, like IF-formulas, DO-formulas, GOTO-formulas and so on, and the document had used "sentence" for what later would be called "non-executable statements" (i.e. definitions or declarations).
Before FORTRAN (1951 to 1953), for his high-level programming language Heinz Rutishauser had used the term "Befehl", which means "command". (For what we name today "program", he had used the term "Rechenplan", which means "computation plan".)
I have named the experimental languages I am toying with "Plan <x>" (for Programming LANguage, but also because it is a good term as you pointed out). Originally I was using numbers (probably would skip "Plan 9" like Microsoft skipped Windows 9) but the experiments went in different directions and implying an order was misleading. So I switched to star names: Plan Sirius, Plan Rigel, Plan Vega...
Not yet, and if I publish any of the languages I will probably use a different name (like "Oak" -> "Java"). Though I did call the unfinished language I published "BLA" (Baby 8 LAnguage - an attempt to see if I could fit an interpreter and editor in 1KB) so I might stick with the stupid names after all.
Thanks for the link - at the time I did a quick search and didn't find that or any other language with that name.
The 1KB target was for Baby 8 (the associated processor) binary code. That processor had a few quirks (like only indirect addressing outside the "zero page") and the language design partly reflected that. Seeing other people fit Lisp into less than 512 bytes made me think I had sacrificed too much functionality for size.
The incomplete Squeak code was just a quick test to see if the language made sense at all before wasting time doing the assembly version.
It looks inspiring! Does Bla have any kind of indexing or aggregate data structures? IIRC Tiny Basic had one array that was the leftover part of memory, which is enough to do a lot.
You have to manually carve up the heap into arrays if you want to have more than one. If variable F points to the start of an array then F,I@ will read F[I] while 42!(F,I) is an assignment F[I] := 42. The comma operator is just to convert a word index to a byte index, so F+(2*I)@ and 42!(F+(2*I)) also work but are uglier.
Is it? "Statement", defined by the dictionary as "the expression of an idea or opinion through something other than words.", seems quite apt. Symbols may end up resembling words, which perhaps is your contention, but technically they are only symbols.
Best I can tell, all usable definitions surrounding "Command" seem to suggest an associated action, which isn't true of all statements in imperative programming.
> Best I can tell, all usable definitions surrounding "Command" seem to suggest an associated action, which isn't true of all statements in imperative programming.
The defining characteristic of a programming "statement" is that it can perform some action (even if not all of them do), whereas statements in the usual everyday sense are inert. So it's not a good term.
> The defining characteristic of a programming "statement" is that it can perform some action
Given a declaration "statement" such as:
int x;
What is the expected action? Memory allocation... I guess? Does any compiler implementation actually do that? I believe, in the age of type systems being all the rage, one would simply see that as a type constraint, not as a command to act upon.
Expressing an idea (the values used henceforth should be integers) seems more applicable, no?
In a language that requires you to declare variables before you use them, it clearly does something - you couldn't do "x = 5;" before, and now you can. If you're trying to understand the program operationally (and if you're not then why are you thinking about statements?) it means something like "create a variable called x", even if the implementation of that is a no-op at the machine code level.
> I believe, in the age of type systems being all the rage, one would simply see that as a type constraint, not as a command to act upon.
But in that case by definition one would not be seeing it as a statement! Honestly to me it doesn't really matter whether "int x;" is an expression, a statement, or some mysterious third thing (in the same way that e.g. forward declaring a function isn't a statement or an expression). When we're talking about the distinction between statements and expressions we're talking primarily about statements like "x = x + 1;", which really can't be understood as a statement in the everyday English sense.
> Memory allocation... I guess? Does any compiler implementation actually do that?
In most programming languages, declarations aren't statements, because they don't have any effect at runtime. Maybe you can find some exceptions. Like in BASIC the DIM statement is sort of a declaration, but it does have a runtime effect; it changes the dimensions of an array. (Though some would say that in BASIC no statement is bright.)
Including Ken Thompson's very own[1]. Fair enough that in the olden days there was a clearer distinction made, but even the man who (co-)created C changed his mind on that later because that is how the term has evolved. Now, in normal conversation, if you call `int x;` a statement, nobody is going to struggle to understand what you mean. Are you still living in the 1970s? If so, I admittedly missed that. My assumption was that this discussion is taking place in 2025 with the words of its time.
Your example isn't syntactically valid in Golang. Declarations are statements in Rust too, but not Python, TypeScript, or ECMAScript (which to my surprise does have a "Declaration" nonterminal in its grammar). C++, Java, and C# are half-and-half; in their grammars, some kinds of declarations (in particular, like `int x;`) can be statements, but others cannot.
The distinction hasn't gotten any less clear, but it was already easy to find people in the 01970s who didn't know the difference. You're one of today's lucky ten thousand!
I do frequently encounter people who are failing to solve their problems because they don't know things that were already known in the 01970s, so I think it's worthwhile to study 01970s informatics. Mostly, though, I think it's worth studying the zeitgeist of the 01970s in informatics: some people were making rapid progress on solving fundamental problems, partly because they didn't have certain self-defeating attitudes that are popular in informatics today, such as not caring whether what they say is true or false.
> Your example isn't syntactically valid in Golang.
Well, of course not. Hnlang is clearly not the same language as Go. The different name tips you off to that. However, the same intent can be expressed as a Go statement:
var x int
For what it is worth, the silly pedantry you offer is as funny as you had hoped it would be, so kudos. But it is telling that you had to reach for being funny to mask your cluelessness. Better than being one of those idiots that doubles down on their idiocy once they realize that they have no idea what is going on, I suppose!
The earlier comment was funny. These meme is, unfortunately, quite tired. Commenters on Reddit have been playing on variants of this idea for years. Jokes only work for so long, I'm afraid.
Well, and linguistics. A "statement" in the grammatical sense is a sentence that is declarative in form (as opposed to, in English, interrogative, imperative, or exclamatory) and which thus ostensibly has a truth-value.
