Empty statements
The empty statement does nothing.
EmptyStmt = .
I don’t think there’s much to say here. I suppose we could spend some time debating if/when an empty statement exists in our code. How many empty statements in the following?
Is it one? Zero? An infinite number?
How many “nothings” does this code do?
I can honestly say I’m not sure why “the empty statement” is even defined. It’s only mentioned four other times in the spec, once as one of the possible components of a simple statement:
SimpleStmt = EmptyStmt | ExpressionStmt | SendStmt | IncDecStmt | Assignment | ShortVarDecl .
And then three other times, in contexts similar to the one mentioned yesterday, where it’s mentioned in the context of “the last non-empty statement” in a list.
All in all, it seems this concept could have been left out of the spec without any ill effect. 🤷
In any case, you don’t really need to concern yourself with the empty statement. You’ll never use one. Or you’ll always use a countless number of them. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. LOL
Quotes from The Go Programming Language Specification Language version go1.22 (Feb 6, 2024)