Colon

│ English (en) │ suomi (fi) │ français (fr) │ русский (ru) │ 中文（中国大陆）‎ (zh_CN) │

:

The symbol :, pronounced “colon”, is used in Pascal in several ways:

• in an identifier declaration it seperates the type
  • most notably in var sections
  • but also in const sections (in case of explicitely typed constants)
  • procedure and function parameters have a type, too
  • and return values of functions (including operator overloads)
  • as well as properties
  • in general, everywhere where a new identifier associated with some memory, is introduced (also custom structured type definitions)
• in case selectors it closes a match-list
• in label definitions the colon seperates the instruction from the label name
• also some routines, especially the Str, write and writeLn procedures accept further parameters via colon separated arguments
• Offset / segment separation under DOS Mem[$B800:$0000]

The following example shows the most prevalent usage scenarios:

 1program colonDemo(input, output, stderr);
 2
 3procedure numberReport(const i: int64);
 4begin
 5	case i of
 6		low(i)..-1:
 7		begin
 8			writeLn('Your number is negative. ☹');
 9		end;
10		1..high(i):
11		begin
12			// right aligns to a width of 24 characters
13			writeLn(i:24);
14		end;
15		else
16		begin
17			writeLn('You''ve entered zero.');
18		end;
19	end;
20end;
21
22var
23	i: int64;
24
25begin
26	writeLn('Enter a number:');
27	readLn(i);
28	numberReport(i);
29end.

other remarks

• Colon appears in the assignment operator :=.
• In ASCII the character colon : has the value 58.