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2. Assignment Operators

Assignment operators assign values.

For the AQA exam board, the most common pseudocode assignment operator is the back pointing arrow which is the equivalent of =

An operator always acts on at least one item, which is called the 'argument' of the operator.

In the case of assignment, ? copies the value of its right argument into the argument on its left.

MyVariable  2

This assigns the value 2 to the variable named 'MyVariable'.

The assignment operator can also copy a value from one variable to another. For example

MyVariable  AnotherVariable

Because of the right-to-left rule, that statement is going to copy the value of the right variable AnotherVariable into the variable on the left MyVariable - not the other way around.

Because of the assigment operator, you can write code to carry out calculations and assign the result to a single variable, like this

MyVariable  AnotherVariable + 3 + Age

In the code above the + operator is adding up the arguments on the right hand side of ?, then the ? operator assigns the result to the argument on its left: MyVariable.

In many actual programming languages, the symbol "=" is used for assignment. But your exams will always use "".

Challenge see if you can find out one extra fact on this topic that we haven't already told you

Click on this link: What are assignment operators?