Assignment Operator

What Does Assignment Operator Mean?

An assignment operator is the operator used to assign a new value to a variable, property, event or indexer element in C# programming language. Assignment operators can also be used for logical operations such as bitwise logical operations or operations on integral operands and Boolean operands.

Techopedia Explains Assignment Operator

The following are the characteristics of assignment operators:

When using the "=" operator for an assignment with the left operand as the property or indexer access, the property or indexer must have a set accessor.
Overloading a binary operator implicitly overloads its corresponding assignment operator (if any).
The different assignment operators are based on the type of operation performed between two operands such as addition (+=), subtraction, (-=), etc. The meaning of the operator symbol used depends on the type of the operands.
Assignment operators are right-associative, which means they are grouped from right to left.
Although assignment using assignment operator (a += b) achieves the same result as that without ( =a +b), the difference between the two ways is that unlike in the latter example, "a" is evaluated only once.
The assignment operator usually returns a reference to the object so as to be used in multiple assignments made in a single statement such as "a=b=c", where a, b and c are operands.
The assignment operator expects the type of both the left- and right-hand side to be the same for successful assignment.

In C#, an expression using an assignment operator might be "x op y", where x and y are operands and "op" represents the operator. The simple assignment operator "=" is used to store the value of its right-hand operand into the memory location denoted by the left-hand operand. The result is its return value. The other assignment operators that perform indicated operation on the two operands and assign a resulting value to the left operand are called compound assignment operators. These include: