Begin

The reserved word begin marks the start of the definition of the executable portion of a block. In conjunction with end it is also used to group statements into a so-called “compound statement”.

Note: In Pascal a compound statement does not create a new scope. Only blocks do.

In extended Pascal to begin do … starts the definition of the initialization part of a module.

While every begin must have a corresponding end, not all occurrences of end have a corresponding begin.

syntax justification

Lots of programming languages use a pair of single characters to indicate boundaries. Typing out the words begin and end is indeed more cumbersome than writing { }. However, the meaning of such characters is not as obvious as words are.

matching

• The source editor of the Lazarus IDE supports a “find matching begin/end” function.
• vim can be configured to support matching Pascal’s begin/end, too.

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From the Free Pascal wiki, page "Begin", as it stood on 2021-08-21 after a change by Kai Burghardt, out of the wiki's dump of 2024-05-26. Copyright stays with the author who wrote it, according to the old wiki's Licensing page. If you have concerns about this material, message the admin.