The body of the program is a block of C. A block is a bunch of C statements enclosed in curly brackets.

At the moment our program body is empty, so the program does nothing. You can put as many statements as you like into a C program. Each statement does something.

Statements are separated from each other by the ; (semicolon) character. If you miss this out the compiler will become confused and complain at you.

Statements do the actual work which makes your program fly, this includes:

• Creating variables to hold data

• Manipulating variables

• Changing the flow of execution in response to the data being worked on

On the right you can see a program with a number of "statements" in the main function body. As you run the program it moves from one on to the next. (Note that these statements are not actually technically correct C !)

/*  Statements in main  */
void main ( void )
{
  statement1 ; /* not legal C! */
  statement2 ; /* not legal C! */
  statement3 ; /* not legal C! */
  statement4 ; /* not legal C! */
}