Blocks

Learning Objectives

• Understand what we mean by a code block
• Understand how to create a block in JavaScript

Code Blocks

Sometimes when we give instructions, it makes sense to group a certain subset of the instructions together.

Going back to the cake-baking example at the start of this course, our recipe might be divided into two sections - one for preparing the cake mixture, and one for preparing the icing.

Similarly when we give instructions to a computer, there might be set of statements that makes sense grouped together.

In JavaScript, these groups of statements are called blocks. We define a block by wrapping the statements in a pair of curly braces:

{
  const name = prompt("What is your name?");
  console.log("Your name is " + name);
}

The code inside a block is usually indented by a couple of spaces, to make it easier to read and distinguish from code outside of the block.

When used in this way, there isn't much practical benefit to using blocks, but there are a number of tools that we can use in conjunction with blocks to make our programs a lot smarter, which we will look at in the coming chapters.