What are T-SQL Statement Blocks?

Question

While researching something I can across an MSDN article which says:

Exits unconditionally from a query or procedure. RETURN is immediate and complete and can be used at any point to exit from a procedure, batch, or statement block. Statements that follow RETURN are not executed.

The documentation didn't come close to the specific situation I was researching. After reading it I realized that I didn't understand the Return statement, and (more specifically) the definition of "statement blocks" as well as I thought. So...

What exactly is a t-sql "statement block"? Are they defined by Begin ... End like brackets in C#, { ... }, or something else entirely?

Thanks!

Answer 1

They come in a variety of flavors (try, catch) but generally they look like

BEGIN
    PRINT 'I am a block'
    RETURN
    PRINT 'I am still in a block but you will not see me'
END    
PRINT 'Too late, we returned from the above block'

Answer 2

I would agree that that sentence in the documentation is misleading.

RETURN will not just exit the most immediate BEGIN END block (which can be nested), but will return from the entire function or procedure, and I'm not sure what it really means to exit a batch - perhaps in SSMS with the GO separator, it would continue to run later batches (I'll have to test that) - GO is a client side thing, so I'm not sure how useful that concept is in practice.