ASCII 59 — ;

The semicolon terminates statements in C, C++, Java, JavaScript, C#, and many other programming languages derived from C's syntax. In English, it connects closely related independent clauses. The semicolon is at the center of a persistent style debate in JavaScript: some developers insist on explicit semicolons while others rely on Automatic Semicolon Insertion (ASI). In CSS, semicolons separate property declarations within a rule block. In SQL, semicolons terminate queries. In Unix shell scripting, ';' separates sequential commands placed on a single line.

Punctuation marks serve as the structural scaffolding of written language, delineating sentences, clauses, and phrases while conveying emphasis and grouping. In programming, these same characters gain powerful additional roles as operators, statement terminators, delimiters, and syntactic markers that compilers and interpreters rely upon. This dual significance in both natural language and code syntax means punctuation characters carry outsized functional importance relative to their small count in the ASCII character set.

In the ASCII encoding table, Semicolon is assigned code point 59 in decimal (0x3B hexadecimal, 073 octal, 00111011 binary). The 7-bit ASCII standard, first published in 1963 by the American Standards Association, defines exactly 128 characters that remain the foundation of text encoding systems worldwide. UTF-8, the dominant encoding on the modern web, is fully backward compatible with ASCII — every ASCII character is encoded as the identical single byte in UTF-8, guaranteeing that Semicolon works reliably across all operating systems, programming languages, and internet protocols.