In computer programming, a language construct is "a syntactically allowable part of a program that may be formed from one or more lexical tokens in accordance with the rules of the programming language", as defined by in the ISO/IEC 2382 standard (ISO/IEC JTC 1). A term is defined as a "linguistic construct in a conceptual schema language that refers to an entity".
While the terms "language construct" and "control structure" are often used synonymously, there are additional types of logical constructs within a computer program, including variables, expressions, functions, or modules.
Control flow statements (such as conditionals, foreach loops, while loops, etc) are language constructs, not functions. So while (true) is a language construct, while add(10) is a function call.
Examples of language constructs
In PHP print is a language construct.3
<?php print 'Hello world'; ?>is the same as:
<?php print('Hello world'); ?>In Java a class is written in this format:
public class MyClass { //Code . . . . . . }In C++ a class is written in this format:
class MyCPlusPlusClass { //Code . . . . };References
"ISO/IEC 2382, Information technology — Vocabulary". https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso-iec:2382:ed-1:v1:en ↩
"ISO/IEC 2382, Information technology — Vocabulary". https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso-iec:2382:ed-1:v1:en ↩
"PHP: print - Manual". www.php.net. Retrieved 2022-11-18. https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.print.php ↩