Assignment

• Phix
• Core Language
  • Atoms and Integers
  • Sequences and Strings
  • Phix vs Conventional Languages
  • Comments
  • Expressions
  • Declarations
  • Statements
    • Assignment
      • Assignment with Operator
      • Explicit Discard
      • Multiple Assignment
    • Procedure Call
    • If Statement
    • While Statement
    • Short-Circuit Evaluation
    • For Statement
    • Exit Statement
    • Return Statement
    • TryCatch Statement
    • Special Top-Level Statements
    • Debugging and Profiling
• Library Routines
• Other Libraries
• Recommended Tools
• Internals
• Glossary

Assignment

An assignment statement assigns the value of an expression to a simple variable, or to a subscript or slice of a variable. e.g.

The previous value of the variable, or element(s) of the subscripted or sliced variable are discarded. For example, suppose x was a 1000-element sequence that we had initialized with:

and then later we assigned an atom to x with:

This is perfectly legal since x is declared as an object. The previous value of x, namely the 1000-element sequence, would simply disappear. Actually, the space consumed by the 1000-element sequence will be automatically recycled due to Phix’s dynamic storage allocation.

Note that the equals symbol '=' is used for both assignment and for equality testing. There is never any confusion because an assignment in Phix is a statement only, it cannot be used as an expression (as in C). Alternatively and optionally you can explicitly use ":=" for assignment and "==" for equality testing.