Chapter 7

Expressions and
Assignment
Statements
Chapter 7 Topics

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

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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

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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

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Arithmetic Expressions: Design Issues

• Design issues for arithmetic expressions

– Operator precedence rules?
– Operator associativity rules?
– Order of operand evaluation?
– Operand evaluation side effects?
– Operator overloading?
– Type mixing in expressions?

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Arithmetic Expressions: Operators

• A unary operator has one operand

• A binary operator has two operands
• A ternary operator has three operands

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Arithmetic Expressions: Operator
Precedence Rules
• The operator precedence rules for
expression evaluation define the order
in which “adjacent” operators of
different precedence levels are
evaluated
• Typical precedence levels
– parentheses
– unary operators
– ** (if the language supports it)
– *, /
– +, -

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Arithmetic Expressions: Operator
Associativity Rule
• The operator associativity rules for expression
evaluation define the order in which adjacent
operators with the same precedence level are
evaluated
• 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
overriden with parentheses
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Expressions in Ruby and Scheme
• Ruby
– All arithmetic, relational, and assignment
operators, as well as array indexing, shifts,
and bit-wise logic operators, are implemented
as methods
• Scheme (and Common LISP)
- All arithmetic and logic operations are by
explicitly called subprograms
- a + b * c is coded as (+ a (* b c))

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Arithmetic Expressions: Conditional
Expressions

• Conditional Expressions
– C-based languages (e.g., C, C++)
– An example:
average = (count == 0)? 0 : sum / count

– Evaluates as if written as follows:

if (count == 0)
average = 0
else
average = sum /count

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Arithmetic Expressions: Operand
Evaluation Order

• Operand evaluation order

1. Variables: fetch the value from memory
2. Constants: sometimes a fetch from memory;
sometimes the constant is in the machine
language instruction
3. Parenthesized expressions: evaluate all
operands and operators first
4. The most interesting case is when an
operand is a function call

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Arithmetic Expressions: Potentials for
Side Effects

• Functional side effects: when a function changes

a two-way parameter or a non-local variable
• Problem with functional side effects:
– When a function referenced in an expression alters
another operand of the expression; e.g., for a
parameter change:
a = 10;
/* assume that fun changes its parameter */
b = a + fun(&a);

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Referential Transparency

• A program has the property of referential

transparency if any two expressions in the
program that have the same value can be
substituted for one another anywhere in
the program, without affecting the action
of the program
result1 = (fun(a) + b) / (fun(a) – c);
temp = fun(a);
result2 = (temp + b) / (temp – c);
If fun has no side effects, result1 = result2
Otherwise, not, and referential transparency is violated

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Overloaded Operators

• Use of an operator for more than one

purpose is called operator overloading
• 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

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Overloaded Operators (continued)

• C++, C#, and F# allow user-defined

overloaded operators
– When sensibly used, such operators can be an
aid to readability (avoid method calls,
expressions appear natural)
– Potential problems:
• Users can define nonsense operations
• Readability may suffer, even when the operators
make sense

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Type Conversions

• A narrowing conversion is one that

converts an object to a type that cannot
include all of the values of the original
type e.g., float to int
• A widening conversion is one in which an
object is converted to a type that can
include at least approximations to all of
the values of the original type
e.g., int to float

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Type Conversions: Mixed Mode
• A mixed-mode expression is one that has
operands of different types
• A coercion is an implicit type conversion
• Disadvantage of coercions:
– They decrease in the type error detection ability of the
compiler
• In most languages, all numeric types are coerced
in expressions, using widening conversions
• In ML and F#, there are no coercions in
expressions

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Explicit Type Conversions

• Called casting in C-based languages

• Examples
– C: (int)angle
– F#: float(sum)

Note that F#’s syntax is similar to that of

function calls

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Errors in Expressions

• Causes
– Inherent limitations of arithmetic
e.g., division by zero
– Limitations of computer arithmetic
e.g. overflow
• Often ignored by the run-time system

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Relational and Boolean
Expressions
• Relational Expressions
– Use relational operators and operands of
various types
– Evaluate to some Boolean representation
– Operator symbols used vary somewhat among
languages (!=, /=, ~=, .NE., <>, #)
• JavaScript and PHP have two additional
relational operator, === and !==
- Similar to their cousins, == and !=, except that
they do not coerce their operands
– Ruby uses == for equality relation operator that
uses coercions and eql? for those that do not
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Relational and Boolean Expressions

• Boolean Expressions
– Operands are Boolean and the result is Boolean
– Example operators
• C89 has no Boolean type--it uses int type
with 0 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 is evaluated, producing 0 or 1
– The evaluation result is then compared with
the third operand (i.e., c)
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Short Circuit Evaluation

• An expression in which the result is

determined without evaluating all of the
operands and/or operators
• Example: (13 * a) * (b / 13 – 1)
If a is zero, there is no need to evaluate (b /13
- 1)
• Problem with non-short-circuit evaluation
index = 0;
while (index <= length) && (LIST[index] != value)
index++;
– When index=length, LIST[index] will cause an
indexing problem (assuming LIST is length - 1 long)

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Short Circuit Evaluation
(continued)
• 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 |)
• All logic operators in Ruby, Perl, ML, F#, and
Python are short-circuit evaluated
• Ada: programmer can specify either (short-circuit
is specified with and then and or else)
• Short-circuit evaluation exposes the potential
problem of side effects in expressions
e.g. (a > b) || (b++ / 3)

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Assignment Statements

• The general syntax

<target_var> <assign_operator> <expression>
• The assignment operator
= Fortran, BASIC, the C-based languages
:= Ada
• = can be bad when it is overloaded for
the relational operator for equality (that’s
why the C-based languages use == as the
relational operator)

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Assignment Statements: Conditional
Targets
• Conditional targets (Perl)
($flag ? $total : $subtotal) = 0

Which is equivalent to

if ($flag){
$total = 0
} else {
$subtotal = 0
}

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Assignment Statements: Compound
Assignment Operators
• A shorthand method of specifying a
commonly needed form of assignment
• Introduced in ALGOL; adopted by C and
the C-based languaes
– Example

a = a + b

can be written as

a += b

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Assignment Statements: Unary
Assignment Operators
• Unary assignment operators in C-based
languages combine increment and
decrement operations with assignment
• Examples
sum = ++count (count incremented, then
assigned to sum)
sum = count++ (count assigned to sum, then
incremented
count++ (count incremented)
-count++ (count incremented then negated)

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 Assignment as an Expression
• In the C-based languages, Perl, and
JavaScript, the assignment statement
produces a result and can be used as an
operand
while ((ch = getchar())!= EOF){…}

ch = getchar() is carried out; the result

(assigned to ch) is used as a conditional
value for the while statement
• Disadvantage: another kind of expression
side effect

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Multiple Assignments

• Perl, Ruby, and Lua allow multiple-target

multiple-source assignments
($first, $second, $third) = (20, 30, 40);

Also, the following is legal and performs an interchange:

($first, $second) = ($second, $first);

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Assignment in Functional Languages

• Identifiers in functional languages are only

names of values
• ML
– Names are bound to values with val
val fruit = apples + oranges;
- If another val for fruit follows, it is a new and
different name
• F#
– F#’s let is like ML’s val, except let also
creates a new scope

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Mixed-Mode Assignment
• Assignment statements can also be
mixed-mode
• In Fortran, C, Perl, and C++, any
numeric type value can be assigned to
any numeric type variable
• In Java and C#, only widening
assignment coercions are done
• In Ada, there is no assignment coercion

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Summary

• Expressions
• Operator precedence and associativity
• Operator overloading
• Mixed-type expressions
• Various forms of assignment

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