Zeitschdft ~4"t'~r for Physik A /"~ILUI I IN~ and Nuclei @~ Springer-Verlag 1982 It is shown that nuclear target fragmentation in proton and heavy ion induced reactions, in particular the following experimental facts concerning the mass-yield distribution can be understood in terms of a semiclassical model: (i) its independence on the mass of the projectile at approximately the same incident energies, (ii) its trend of approaching a limit at higher bombarding energies, (iii) its "U-formed" shape at sufficiently high bombarding energies. Standard methods in statistical theory of chemical equilibrium are used to calculate the mass-yield distribution for medium and heavy target nuclei in high-energy nuclear reactions where the Coulomb interaction between the fragments is taken into account selfconsistently. The result shows: The fact that the decaying rest target nucleus and its fragments are bounded objects of finite size and finite charge have significant influences, especially on the tbrm of the mass-yield distributions.