Beginning C# 3.0

6.1. Relational Operators

Making a decision about anything involves comparing one thing against another. It's no different in a computer program. You learned in Chapter 3 that statements are built up from operators and operands. I used the math operators to illustrate how program statements are constructed from those basic building blocks. In this section I want to discuss another set of operators that you have at your disposal: the relational operators. The relational operators are presented in Table 6-1.

Table 6-1. Table 6-1

Relational Operator	Relational Tests	Example	Outcome of Example
==	Equal	15 == 20	False
!=	Not equal	15 != 20	True
<	Less than	15 < 20	True
<=	Less than or equal to	15 <= 20	True
>	Greater than	15 > 20	False
>=	Greater than or equal to	15 >= 20	False

In Table 6-1, every example has one operand on the left-hand side of the relational operator (15) and a second operand on the right-hand side of the operator (20). Once again, two operands are associated with the use of a relational operator, so all relational operators are binary operators. Therefore, combining two operands with a relational operator results in a relational expression.

Note that each relational expression ultimately resolves to a logic True or logic False state. In C#, logic True and logic False are expressed as Boolean values. The result of a Boolean expression resolves to the C# keywords true or false. In Table 6-1, each example shown in the third column resolves to the state shown in the fourth column. In the table, ...