I am puzzled. 'statement' and 'expression' are items of JavaScript syntax (or C or Java or C++ or Perl or whatever). So to explain it, you point to the syntax

I am puzzled. 'statement' and 'expression' are items of JavaScript syntax (or C or Java or C++ or Perl or whatever). So to explain it, you point to the syntax definition. This isn't going to be explained satisfactorily by analogies or intuition, and it won't be logical at all, because it isn't, and you could define the grammar with no such distinction or a different set of distinctions as many posters already showed here. Besides being arbitrary, I also never found this a useful distinction after having programmed in languages that don't distinguish this. And look at how GCC introduced ({...}) to convert back a statement into an expression. Anyway, to define this, you have to simply list all the things: statements are 'return', '{...}', 'while() {... }', etc., while expressions are '5', 'f(...)', etc. That's it, that's the explanation. No intuition, just a comprehensive list taken from the grammar. If course there is some rough idea behind it, which explains why there is a difference, but this is a history class, not an explanation: statements do some action, i.e., this is an imperative concept. Expressions have a value, i.e., this is a functional concept.