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Language construct

Syntactically valid part of a program formed from lexical tokens

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Source updated August 18, 2026

In computer programming, a language construct is a syntactically allowable part of a program that may be formed from one or more lexical tokens in accordance with the rules of the programming language, as defined by in the ISO/IEC 2382 standard (ISO/IEC JTC 1). A term is defined as a "linguistic construct in a conceptual schema language that refers to an entity".

While the terms "language construct" and "control structure" are often used synonymously, there are additional types of logical constructs within a computer program, including variables, expressions, functions, or modules.

Control flow statements (such as conditionals, foreach loops, while loops, etc.) are language constructs, not functions. So while (true) is a language construct, while add(10) is a function call.

01Examples of language constructs

In PHP print is a language construct.

<?php print 'Hello world'; ?>

is the same as:

<?php print('Hello world'); ?>

In Java a class is written in this format:

public class MyClass { //Code . . . . . . }

In C++ a class is written in this format:

class MyCPlusPlusClass { //Code . . . . };

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Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Language construct”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

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