Language - Assignment

About

An assignment is an expression that gives a value to a variable.

Type and syntax

Implicit

Simple form

In its simplest form, an assignment statement has a variable on the left of the = sign and an expression on the right. This ordered form, and similar variations, is quite prevalent in modern programming languages.

variableName = value

• Other variations exists but are less prevalent.

value -> variableName
// or
value <- variableName

Tuple

A tuple assignment allows several variables to be assigned at once.

Example: x becomes y and vice versa.

x, y = y, x

Operator (Compound)

An assignment operator (also known as Compound operator) is a short cut language structure that combine a math operation with assignment,

Example:

x = x * scale

can be rewritten as

x *= scale

The same is true for all:

• mathematical operator
• bitwise binary operator

Example of compound operator:

• +=,
• -=,
• *=,
• /=

Explicit

Assignment statements are an explicit form of assignment, but there are many places in a program where an assignment occurs implicitly:

• a function call implicitly assigns the argument values to the corresponding parameter variables;
• a return statement implicitly assigns the return operands to the corresponding result variables;
• and a literal expression for a composite type such as an array

Go Example:

medals := []string{" gold", "silver", "bronze"}

implicitly assigns each element, as if it had been written like this:

medals[0] = "gold" 
medals[1] = "silver" 
medals[2] = "bronze"

Documentation / Reference

• The Go Programming Language