Documentation for semicolon

[ygoe]

Describe the bug
The documentation does not at all explain what a semicolon (;) means. I've seen them in scripts on Stack Overflow but I don't know what exactly it does. I have several if statements separated by a semicolon. Will the output be appended? Piped? Ignored?

[pkoppstein]

@ygoe - Yes, neither the official tutorial nor the official manual makes explicit the important details about semicolons, but other (official) documents do. For example, the "jq Language Description" (https://github.com/stedolan/jq/wiki/jq-Language-Description) has these paragraphs:

Functions can have arguments. Again, function arguments are not value arguments but thunk arguments. Calling a function with arguments looks like this: bar(some_expression; another_expression). Pay close attention to the use of ; for separating argument expressions, and do not confuse it with , — , is an operator that joins the outputs of the expressions on its left and right, while ; is only a syntactic separator that separates function arguments and terminates function bodies.

Semi-colons are required for terminating import, include, and def function bodies, as well as for separating expression arguments to functions of more than one expression argument.

[ygoe]

Oh, thanks. That clears it up. I discovered that those semicolons were in fact separating arguments of a foreach function before that. And I wasn't aware that there are multiple disjuct documents about jq. That's a bit confusing. Google just pointed me to the project website that gave so much documentation that I believed that was the one.

[huyz]

It's still not in the official manual and I had to Google to find this issue explaining it.

[wader]

Hi, see #2305 why things are not updating much atm