Semicolon

A semicolon is a punctuation mark. In English, it is used to join two sentences slightly more closely than they would be joined if separated by a full stop (or period). The semicolon is also used as a sort of "senior comma" to make meaning clear in a sentence where commass are already being used for other purposes.

Examples:

I am alone; my wife had to leave.

I traveled to London, England; Tijuana, Mexico; and Reykjavik, Iceland.

Lisa scored 2,845,770 points; Marcia, 2,312,860; and Jeff, 1,726,640.

---

In computer programming, the semicolon corresponds to Unicode and ASCII character 59, or 0x003B. In many procedural programming languages (such as Pascal, Ada, C or C++), it is used to separate instructions from each other. In assembly language and many other types of code, beginning a line with a semicolon usually means it is a comment.