Designing Active Server Pages

Creating ASP Pages with JScript

Web developers who are familiar with writing client-side JavaScript code already have a good understanding of JScript’s syntax and structure. JScript’s syntax and control structures are also very similar to C’s. For example, JScript’s control structures — if ... else, switch, while, do ... while, and for statements — are syntactically identical to C’s.

Statement Termination

JScript handles its statement termination a bit differently than C. In C, a semicolon is needed to end a statement; in JScript, either a semicolon or a newline character will suffice. Therefore, you can have a JScript statement end without a semicolon as long as the next statement begins on a new line. You can have multiple statements on one line, but then a semicolon must delimit each of these statements. For example, the following code fragment illustrates the legal and illegal use of semicolons and newline characters:

<% @LANGUAGE = "JScript" %>
<% 
   Response.Write("Each new-line character represents")
   Response.Write("a new statement in JScript.  So does a semicolon.<P>")

   // This is legal code:
   Response.Write("Hello, "); Response.Write("World!");

   // This is not:
   Response.Write("Hello, ")  Response.Write("World!");
%>

I highly recommend always ending each statement with a semicolon, regardless of whether the next statement starts on a new line. JScript code examples in this book will adhere to this strict use of semicolons.

JScript’s Variables and Datatypes

JScript does not require ...