Operators in C programming : Assignment Operators

There are several different assignment operators in C. All of them are used to form assignment expressions which assign the value of an expression to an identifier. The most commonly used assignment operator is =. Assignment expressions that make use of the operator are written in the form:

identifier = expression

Where identifier generally represents a variable, and expression represents a constant, a variable or more complex expression.

 Here are some typical assignment expressions that make use of the = operator.

a = 3

x = y

delta = 0.001

sum = a+b

area = length * width

Assignment operator = and equality operator = = are distinctly different. The assignment operator can be applied only to integer type signed or unsigned) and not to float or double. They are

Operator                    Meaning

&                                 bitwise AND

|                                   bitwise OR

^                                  bitwise exclusive OR

<<                                Left shift

>>                                right shift

~                                  bitwise one’s complement operator

Consider, a = 60 and b = 15. THe binary representation of a and b for 32 bits

a = 0000 0000 0011 1100

b = 0000 0000 0000 1111

c = a & b = 0000 0000 0011 1111 = 12

d = a | b = 0000 0000 0011 1111 = 63

n = ~ a = 1111 1111 1100 0011 = -61

e = a ^ b = 0000 0000 0011 0011 =51

For Bitwise Shift Operator

Operand Bitwise Shift operator number

For e.g.

a = 0000 0000 0011 1100

f = a << 3

shift1 = 0000 0000 0111 1000

shift2 = 0000 0000 1111 0000

shift3 = 0000 0001 1110 0000 = f = 480

Similarly,

g = a > > 3

shift1 = 0000 0000 0001 1110

shift2 = 0000 0000 0000 1111

shift3 = 0000 0000 0000 0111 = g = 7