Expressions and

Assignment Statements
 Topics

• Introduction Arithmetic Expressions

• Overloaded Operators
• Type Conversions
• Relational and Boolean Expressions
• Short-Circuit Evaluation
• Assignment Statements
• Mixed-Mode Assignment
 Introduction

• Expressions are the fundamental means of specifying computations in

a programming language
• To understand expression evaluation, need to be familiar with the
orders of operator and operand evaluation
• Essence of imperative languages is dominant role of assignment
statements
 Arithmetic Expressions

• Arithmetic evaluation was one of the motivations for the development

of the first programming languages.
• Arithmetic expressions consist of operators, operands, parentheses,
and function calls
 Arithmetic Expressions Design Issues

Design issues for arithmetic expressions are

• operator precedence rules
• operator associativity rules
• order of operand evaluation
• operand evaluation side effects
• operator overloading
• mode mixing expressions
 Arithmetic Expressions Operators

• A unary operator has one operand

• A binary operator has two operands
• A ternary operator has three operands
Arithmetic Expressions Operator Precedence Rules

When evaluating expressions, operator precedence rules define the

order of evaluation of “adjacent” operators of different precedence
levels.
Typical Precedence Levels are
1. parentheses
2. unary operators
3. ** (if the language supports it)
4. *, /
5. +, -
Arithmetic Expressions Operator Associativity Rule
When evaluating expressions, operator associativity rules define the
order of evaluation of “adjacent” operators with the same precedence
level.
Typical Associativity Rules
• Left to right, except **, which is right to left
• Sometimes unary operators associate right to left (e.g., in FORTRAN)
• APL is different; all operators have equal precedence and all operators
associate right to left
• Precedence and associativity rules can be overridden with
parentheses
Arithmetic Expressions /Conditional
Expressions
• C-based languages example
• average = (count == 0) ? 0 : sum / count
• evaluates as if written like
• if (count == 0)
• average = 0
• else
• average = sum /count
Arithmetic Expressions Operand Evaluation Order

• Variables fetch the value from memory

• Constants sometimes a fetch from memory
• “immediate” values are constants located in the machine language
instruction
• Parenthesized expressions evaluate all operands and operators first
 Arithmetic Expressions Potentials
for Side Effects
Definition: A functional side effect occurs when a function changes a
two-way parameter or a non-local variable
• The Problem with functional side effects: When a function referenced
in an expression alters another operand of the expression!
• Example: for a parameter change
• /* assume func changes its parameter */
• a = 10;
• b = a + func(a);
 Functional Side Effects
Two possible solutions to the problem
• Write the language definition to disallow functional side effects
• No two-way parameters in functions
• No non-local references in functions
Advantage: it works!
Disadvantage: inflexibility of two-way parameters and non-local
references
 Overloaded Operators

Definition: Use of an operator for more than one purpose

• Some are common (e.g., + for int and float)
• Some are potential trouble (e.g., * in C and C++)
• Loss of compiler error detection
• omission of an operand should be a detectable error
• Some loss of readability
• Can be avoided by introduction of new symbols (e.g., Pascal’s div for
integer division)
• Overloaded Operators C++ and Ada allow user-defined overloaded
operators. Potential problems: Users can define nonsense operations
Readability may suffer, even when the operators make sense
 Type Conversions Definition:
narrowing conversion:
1.converting an object to a type that cannot include all of the values of
the original type
• Example: float to int
• Definition: widening conversion:
2.converting an object to a type that can include at least
approximations to all of the values of the original type
• Example: int to float
 Type Conversions Mixed Mode

• Definition: mixed-mode expression: an expression that has operands

of different types
• Definition: coercion: an implicit type conversion
• Disadvantage: Coercions decrease the type error detection ability of
the compiler.
• In most languages, all numeric types are coerced in expressions, using
widening conversions
• In Ada, there are virtually no coercions in expressions
 Explicit Type Conversions

Explicit Type Conversions called casting in C-based language

• Examples C: (int) angle
• Ada: Float (sum)
• Note that Ada’s syntax is similar to function calls
 Type Conversions Errors in
Expressions
• Type Conversions Errors in Expressions causes Inherent limitations of
arithmetic
• Example: division by zero
• Limitations of computer arithmetic
• Example: overflow Often ignored by the run-time system
 Relational Expressions

• Use relational operators and operands of various types

• Evaluate to some Boolean representation
• Operator symbols used vary somewhat among languages (!=, /=, .NE.,
<>, #)
 Boolean Expressions Operands
Boolean Expressions Operands are Boolean and the result is Boolean
Example operators:
• FORTRAN FORTRAN 90 C Ada .
• AND and && and .
• OR or || or .
• NOT not ! not
• xor
• No Boolean Type in C. it uses int type with zero for false and nonzero for true
• One odd characteristic of C’s expressions: a < b < c is a legal expression, but the
result is not what you might expect: Left operator, a < b, is evaluated, producing 0 or
1 The evaluation result is then compared with the third operand (i.e., 0 < c or 1 < c)
 Operator Precedence
• postfix ++,--
• unary +, -
• prefix ++, --, !
• *, /, %
• binary +, -
• <, >, <=, >=
• =, !=
• &&
• ||
 Short Circuit Evaluation
• C, C++, and Java: use short-circuit evaluation for the usual Boolean
operators (&& and ||), but also provide bitwise Boolean operators
that are not short circuit (& and |)
• Ada: programmer can specify either in code: short-circuit is specified
with and then and or else
 Short Circuit Evaluation
• Evaluating an expression without evaluating all of the operands
and/or operators
• Examples: (13*a) * (b/13–1)
• If a is zero,
• there is no need to evaluate (b/13-1)
• R = P && Q
• If P is false,
• there is no need to evaluate Q
 Short Circuit Evaluation
• A problem with non-short-circuit evaluation:
• index = 1;
• while ( (index <= length)
• & (LIST[index] != value) )
• index++;
• When
• index==length,
• LIST[index]
• will cause an indexing problem (assuming LIST has length-1 elements)
• Short-circuit evaluation exposes the potential problem of side effects in
expressions:
• Example: (a > b) || (b++ / 3)
 Assignment Statements
• The general syntax
• <target_var> <assign_operator> <expression>
• The assignment operator
• = FORTRANs, BASIC, PL/I, C, C++, Java
• := ALGOLs, Pascal, Ada
• = can be bad when it is overloaded with the relational operator for
equality
• Assignment Statements Conditional Targets
C, C++, Java (flag) ? total : subtotal = 0 which is equivalent to if (flag)
total = 0 else subtotal = 0
• Assignment Statements Compound Operators
A shorthand method of specifying a commonly needed form of
assignment Introduced in ALGOL; adopted by C Example a = a + b is
written as a += b
• Assignment Statements Unary Assignment Operators
Unary assignment operators in C-based languages combine increment
and decrement operations with assignment Examples: sum = ++count
sum = count++ count++ -count++
• Assignment as an Expression

In C, C++, and Java, the assignment statement produces a result

and can be used as operands An example: while ((ch = getchar())!
= EOF){…} ch = getchar() is carried out the result (assigned to ch)
is used as a conditional value for the while statement
• Mixed-Mode Assignment

Assignment statements can also be mixed-mode Examples: int a,

b; float c; c = a / b; Pascal: integer variables can be assigned to
real variables, but real variables cannot be assigned to integers
Java: only widening assignment coercions Ada: there is no
assignment coercion