what symbol is the assignment operator

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4.6: Assignment Operator

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• Patrick McClanahan
• San Joaquin Delta College

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Assignment Operator

The assignment operator allows us to change the value of a modifiable data object (for beginning programmers this typically means a variable). It is associated with the concept of moving a value into the storage location (again usually a variable). Within C++ programming language the symbol used is the equal symbol. But bite your tongue, when you see the = symbol you need to start thinking: assignment. The assignment operator has two operands. The one to the left of the operator is usually an identifier name for a variable. The one to the right of the operator is a value.

The value 21 is moved to the memory location for the variable named: age. Another way to say it: age is assigned the value 21.

The item to the right of the assignment operator is an expression. The expression will be evaluated and the answer is 14. The value 14 would assigned to the variable named: total_cousins.

The expression to the right of the assignment operator contains some identifier names. The program would fetch the values stored in those variables; add them together and get a value of 44; then assign the 44 to the total_students variable.

As we have seen, assignment operators are used to assigning value to a variable. The left side operand of the assignment operator is a variable and right side operand of the assignment operator is a value. The value on the right side must be of the same data-type of the variable on the left side otherwise the compiler will raise an error. Different types of assignment operators are shown below:

• “=” : This is the simplest assignment operator, which was discussed above. This operator is used to assign the value on the right to the variable on the left. For example: a = 10; b = 20; ch = 'y';

If initially the value 5 is stored in the variable a,  then:  (a += 6) is equal to 11.  (the same as: a = a + 6)

If initially value 8 is stored in the variable a, then (a -= 6) is equal to  2. (the same as a = a - 6)

If initially value 5 is stored in the variable a,, then (a *= 6) is equal to 30. (the same as a = a * 6)

If initially value 6 is stored in the variable a, then (a /= 2) is equal to 3. (the same as a = a / 2)

Below example illustrates the various Assignment Operators:

Definitions

 Adapted from:  "Assignment Operator"  by  Kenneth Leroy Busbee , (Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/[email protected] ) is licensed under  CC BY 4.0

cppreference.com

Assignment operators.

Assignment and compound assignment operators are binary operators that modify the variable to their left using the value to their right.

[ edit ] Simple assignment

The simple assignment operator expressions have the form

Assignment performs implicit conversion from the value of rhs to the type of lhs and then replaces the value in the object designated by lhs with the converted value of rhs .

Assignment also returns the same value as what was stored in lhs (so that expressions such as a = b = c are possible). The value category of the assignment operator is non-lvalue (so that expressions such as ( a = b ) = c are invalid).

rhs and lhs must satisfy one of the following:

• both lhs and rhs have compatible struct or union type, or..
• rhs must be implicitly convertible to lhs , which implies
• both lhs and rhs have arithmetic types , in which case lhs may be volatile -qualified or atomic (since C11)
• both lhs and rhs have pointer to compatible (ignoring qualifiers) types, or one of the pointers is a pointer to void, and the conversion would not add qualifiers to the pointed-to type. lhs may be volatile or restrict (since C99) -qualified or atomic (since C11) .
• lhs is a (possibly qualified or atomic (since C11) ) pointer and rhs is a null pointer constant such as NULL or a nullptr_t value (since C23)

[ edit ] Notes

If rhs and lhs overlap in memory (e.g. they are members of the same union), the behavior is undefined unless the overlap is exact and the types are compatible .

Although arrays are not assignable, an array wrapped in a struct is assignable to another object of the same (or compatible) struct type.

The side effect of updating lhs is sequenced after the value computations, but not the side effects of lhs and rhs themselves and the evaluations of the operands are, as usual, unsequenced relative to each other (so the expressions such as i = ++ i ; are undefined)

Assignment strips extra range and precision from floating-point expressions (see FLT_EVAL_METHOD ).

In C++, assignment operators are lvalue expressions, not so in C.

[ edit ] Compound assignment

The compound assignment operator expressions have the form

The expression lhs @= rhs is exactly the same as lhs = lhs @ ( rhs ) , except that lhs is evaluated only once.

[ edit ] References

• C17 standard (ISO/IEC 9899:2018):
• 6.5.16 Assignment operators (p: 72-73)
• C11 standard (ISO/IEC 9899:2011):
• 6.5.16 Assignment operators (p: 101-104)
• C99 standard (ISO/IEC 9899:1999):
• 6.5.16 Assignment operators (p: 91-93)
• C89/C90 standard (ISO/IEC 9899:1990):
• 3.3.16 Assignment operators

[ edit ] See Also

Operator precedence

[ edit ] See also

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Assignment, Arithmetic, and Unary Operators

The simple assignment operator.

One of the most common operators that you'll encounter is the simple assignment operator " = ". You saw this operator in the Bicycle class; it assigns the value on its right to the operand on its left:

This operator can also be used on objects to assign object references , as discussed in Creating Objects .

The Arithmetic Operators

The Java programming language provides operators that perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. There's a good chance you'll recognize them by their counterparts in basic mathematics. The only symbol that might look new to you is " % ", which divides one operand by another and returns the remainder as its result.

The following program, ArithmeticDemo , tests the arithmetic operators.

This program prints the following:

You can also combine the arithmetic operators with the simple assignment operator to create compound assignments . For example, x+=1; and x=x+1; both increment the value of x by 1.

The + operator can also be used for concatenating (joining) two strings together, as shown in the following ConcatDemo program:

By the end of this program, the variable thirdString contains "This is a concatenated string.", which gets printed to standard output.

The Unary Operators

The unary operators require only one operand; they perform various operations such as incrementing/decrementing a value by one, negating an expression, or inverting the value of a boolean.

The following program, UnaryDemo , tests the unary operators:

The increment/decrement operators can be applied before (prefix) or after (postfix) the operand. The code result++; and ++result; will both end in result being incremented by one. The only difference is that the prefix version ( ++result ) evaluates to the incremented value, whereas the postfix version ( result++ ) evaluates to the original value. If you are just performing a simple increment/decrement, it doesn't really matter which version you choose. But if you use this operator in part of a larger expression, the one that you choose may make a significant difference.

The following program, PrePostDemo , illustrates the prefix/postfix unary increment operator:

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Assignment operator (=)

Arithmetic operators ( +, -, *, /, % ), compound assignment (+=, -=, *=, /=, %=, >>=, <<=, &=, ^=, |=), increment and decrement (++, --), relational and comparison operators ( ==, =, >, <, >=, <= ), logical operators ( , &&, || ), conditional ternary operator ( ), comma operator ( , ), bitwise operators ( &, |, ^, ~, <<, >> ), explicit type casting operator, other operators, precedence of operators.

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Assignment Operators in C

In C language, the assignment operator stores a certain value in an already declared variable. A variable in C can be assigned the value in the form of a literal, another variable, or an expression.

The value to be assigned forms the right-hand operand, whereas the variable to be assigned should be the operand to the left of the " = " symbol, which is defined as a simple assignment operator in C.

In addition, C has several augmented assignment operators.

The following table lists the assignment operators supported by the C language −

Simple Assignment Operator (=)

The = operator is one of the most frequently used operators in C. As per the ANSI C standard, all the variables must be declared in the beginning. Variable declaration after the first processing statement is not allowed.

You can declare a variable to be assigned a value later in the code, or you can initialize it at the time of declaration.

You can use a literal, another variable, or an expression in the assignment statement.

Once a variable of a certain type is declared, it cannot be assigned a value of any other type. In such a case the C compiler reports a type mismatch error.

In C, the expressions that refer to a memory location are called "lvalue" expressions. A lvalue may appear as either the left-hand or right-hand side of an assignment.

On the other hand, the term rvalue refers to a data value that is stored at some address in memory. A rvalue is an expression that cannot have a value assigned to it which means an rvalue may appear on the right-hand side but not on the left-hand side of an assignment.

Variables are lvalues and so they may appear on the left-hand side of an assignment. Numeric literals are rvalues and so they may not be assigned and cannot appear on the left-hand side. Take a look at the following valid and invalid statements −

Augmented Assignment Operators

In addition to the = operator, C allows you to combine arithmetic and bitwise operators with the = symbol to form augmented or compound assignment operator. The augmented operators offer a convenient shortcut for combining arithmetic or bitwise operation with assignment.

For example, the expression "a += b" has the same effect of performing "a + b" first and then assigning the result back to the variable "a".

Run the code and check its output −

Similarly, the expression "a <<= b" has the same effect of performing "a << b" first and then assigning the result back to the variable "a".

Here is a C program that demonstrates the use of assignment operators in C −

When you compile and execute the above program, it will produce the following result −

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Assignment operators are used to assign values to variables:

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Assignment Operators (Visual Basic)

• 10 contributors

The following are the assignment operators defined in Visual Basic.

^= Operator

*= Operator

/= Operator

\= Operator

+= Operator

-= Operator

<<= Operator

>>= Operator

&= Operator

• Operator Precedence in Visual Basic
• Operators Listed by Functionality

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What is the difference between = (Assignment) and == (Equal to) operators

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The “ = ” is an assignment operator used to assign the value on the right to the variable on the left. 

For example:

Example:  

== operator

The ‘==’ operator checks whether the two given operands are equal or not. If so, it returns true. Otherwise it returns false. 

The differences can be shown in tabular form as follows:

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