Understanding expressions and operations
What are expressions? Well, in simple terms, an expression is a way of computing a value. We've seen how to do this with functions and return values. We will now turn to C's basic set of arithmetic operators for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, which are common in most programming languages. C adds to this a large number of operations that includes incrementation/decrementation, relational operators, logical operators, and bitwise manipulation. C further extends assignment operations in useful ways. Finally, C includes some unusual operators that are not commonly found in other languages, such as conditional and sequence operators.
The expressions we will explore in this chapter consist of one or more values as variables or constants combined with the help of operators. Expressions can be complete statements; however, just as often, expressions are components of complex statements. Operators work on one or more...