Expressions
Statements that evaluate to a value are called
expressions
.
You may be surprised how many statements do evaluate to a value. For
example, an assignment such as:
myVariable = 57;
is an expression; it evaluates to the value assigned, in this case,
57
.
Note that the preceding statement assigns the value
57
to the variable myVariable
.
The assignment operator
(=
) does not test equality; rather it causes
whatever is on the right side (57
) to be assigned
to whatever is on the left side (myVariable
). All
of the C# operators (including assignment and equality) are discussed
later in this chapter (see Section 3.6).
Because myVariable = 57
is an expression that
evaluates to 57
, it can be used as part of another
assignment operator, such as:
mySecondVariable = myVariable = 57;
What happens in this statement is that the literal value
57
is assigned to the variable
myVariable
. The value of that assignment
(57
) is then assigned to the second variable,
mySecondVariable
. Thus, the value
57
is assigned to both variables. You can thus
initialize any number of variables to the same value with one
statement:
a = b = c = d = e = 20;
Get Programming C# now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.