The colon (:) symbol ends block labels and block header statements like DO, FOR, and REPEAT. It also serves as a separator between:

  • A handle reference and an attribute or method, for example ttCust:PRIVATE-DATA or ttCust:CLEAR( ), where ttCust is a handle to a temp-table
  • An object or static type-name reference and a class-based property, method, or event, for example, rObj:ToString( ), rObj:NEXT-SIBLING, or Progress.Lang.Class:GetClass( "Progress.Data.BindingSource" ), where rObj is an object reference to a Progress.Lang.Object instance
  • A character string literal and one of its options, for example, "City/State/Zip":U

It also follows the EDITING keyword in an EDITING phrase and is a device delimiter in Windows.

See :: Punctuation for rules to help you decide whether to use period, colon, or double colon syntax.

See also

:: Punctuation, ; Punctuation, " "Character-string literal, Class-based object reference, Type-name syntax