从编译器的角度来看，Expression，Statement和Declaration有什么区别？

Question

I am going through the Go source code of ast.go at here,and there are 3 types of interfaces that are Expression,Statement and Declaration. But only with the source code I couldn't figure out the difference between them.What I could figure out is that expression results in a object that could be assigned or compared or used as parameter,while statements are some flow control like if-else or for loop. But I found some definitions like

    // An IncDecStmt node represents an increment or decrement statement.
    IncDecStmt struct {
            X      Expr
            TokPos token.Pos   // position of Tok
            Tok    token.Token // INC or DEC
    }

shouldn't it be a expression?I feel confused how to distinguish expressions and statements,are there any rules?

Answer 1

The Golang spec uses those terms:

• Expressions: specifies the computation of a value by applying operators and functions to operands.
• Statements: control execution
• Declarations (and scope): binds a non-blank identifier to a constant, type, variable, function, label, or package

The IncDecStmt is specified as

IncDecStmt = Expression ( "++" | "--" ) .

The "++" and "--" statements increment or decrement their operands by the untyped constant 1.

It uses an expression, but remains a statement (don't produce a new value).