What is an assignment statement?

Name: Problem 20, Chapter 2: Starting Out with Programming Logic and Design
Uploaded: 2021-09-14T13:11:10-08:00
Duration: 2 min 16 s
Channel: Adam Conner
Description: What is an assignment statement?

Key Concepts

Assignment Statement

An assignment statement is a programming instruction that assigns a value to a variable. It takes the result of an expression and stores it in a memory location designated by the variable, thereby updating or establishing the variable's current state.

Variable

A variable is a symbolic name associated with a storage location in memory. It is used to hold data values that can be changed during program execution, making it fundamental to processes like assignment, data manipulation, and computation.

Expression

An expression is a combination of values, variables, and operators that is evaluated to produce another value. In assignment statements, expressions compute the value that will be stored in the variable.

Assignment Operator

The assignment operator is a symbol (commonly '=') used in programming to indicate that the value of the expression on the right is to be stored in the variable on the left. It is the key element that links an expression to a variable in an assignment statement.

Transcript

00:01 Okay, moving on with our cs journey and diving a little bit deeper into variables.

00:08 And, you know, as i said before, variables are one of those components that are really going to make or break your understanding of how to write code as being able to understand how variables work, assigning them values, reading those values, and so on.

00:22 So we're going to talk a little bit about assigning values to variables or variable assignment.

00:27 So the idea of assigning value is kind of like the idea of storing a value in memory and then using that variable name to point to that memory.

00:40 So we've talked already about computer memory and what's going on there.

00:45 And that's what's really happening with variable assignment is when we create a variable and we give it a name like x or age, what we're really doing is we're just reserving a little block of memory.

00:55 And we're letting the program know that if you see the name of that variable, if you see age or if you see x, and you need to know its value, go to this spot in memory and get it.

01:04 And so assigning is about actually storing a value into that memory location.

01:11 So using pseudo code, so again, not syntax for a language, but just to help us as programmers organize, we could say something like set x equal 17, and that equal sign will be used in pretty much all syntax, and that's saying that set the value of x to 17, which in the background means go to the memory location referenced by x and store the number 17 in that memory location.

01:37 So that later, if i do a display x, my code looks at that and says, hey, x is a variable name.

01:42 I know that variable name...

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