Skip to Main Content
Programming C#
book

Programming C#

by Jesse Liberty
July 2001
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
688 pages
16h 14m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Programming C#

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;
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Programming C#, Second Edition

Programming C#, Second Edition

Jesse Liberty
Programming C# 12

Programming C# 12

Ian Griffiths
Programming C# 8.0

Programming C# 8.0

Ian Griffiths

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596001177Supplemental ContentCatalog PageErrata