Assigning Values to Variables

Assignment and order of evaluation #

The first two difficulties that most people face when learning to program involve the assignment operation and the order of evaluation in an expression.

The assignment operation #

You will see lines similar to the following in almost every program in almost every programming language:

a = 10;

The meaning of this line is “make a hold the value 10.” Similarly, the following line means “make b hold the value 20”:

b = 20;

Based on that information, what can be said about the following line?

a = b;

Unfortunately, ...