Double semicolon, why no error?

[africanhacker]

This is rather trivial but I'm still interested to know what is going on.

I was working on a piece of code and accidentally closed off a statement with ;; instead of just ;

Surprisingly (at least to my novice self) the program compiled just fine and did what it was supposed to do.

Would one of our good seniors explain to this lowly student why this is so :D

[DarrylBurke]

Because the empty statement is legal in Java.

db

[JosAH]

This is rather trivial but I'm still interested to know what is going on.

I was working on a piece of code and accidentally closed off a statement with ;; instead of just ;

Surprisingly (at least to my novice self) the program compiled just fine and did what it was supposed to do.

Would one of our good seniors explain to this lowly student why this is so :D

A Darryl already metioned a single semi colon is the empty statement; your compiler would've protested in situations like this:

if (<condition>)
   statement;; // <-- two semicolons
else // 'else without if' error
   statement;

kind regards,

Jos