13.2 The Basic Assignment Operator

We have already looked at the most basic of assignment operators, the = operator. This assignment operator simply assigns the result of an expression to a variable. In essence, the = assignment operator takes two operands. The left-hand operand is the variable to which a value is to be assigned and the right-hand operand is the value to be assigned. The right-hand operand is, more often than not, an expression which performs some type of arithmetic or logical evaluation or a call to a function, the result of which will be assigned to the variable. The following examples are all valid uses of the assignment operator:

var x: Int // Declare a mutable Int variable

val y = 10 // Declare and initialize an immutable Int variable

 

x = 10 // Assign a value to x

x = x + y // Assign the result of x + y to x

x = y // Assign the value of y to x