Assignment

Now that we have created some variables, we would like to store values in them. We do that with an assignment statement.

This example shows three assignments, and the comments show three different ways people sometimes talk about assignment statements. The vocabulary can be confusing here, but the idea is straightforward:

• When you declare a variable, you create a named storage location.
• When you make an assignment to a variable, you give it a value.

A common way to represent variables on paper is to draw a box with the name of the variable on the outside and the value of the variable on the inside. This kind of figure is called a state diagram because is shows what state each of the variables is in (you can think of it as the variable's "state of mind"). This diagram shows the effect of the three assignment statements:

I sometimes use different shapes to indicate different variable types. These shapes should help remind you that one of the rules in C++ is that a variable has to have the same type as the value you assign it. For example, you cannot store a string in an int variable. The following statement generates a compiler error.

This rule is sometimes a source of confusion, because there are many ways that you can convert values from one type to another, and C++ sometimes converts things automatically. But for now you should remember that as a general rule variables and values have the same type, and we'll talk about special cases later.

Another source of confusion is that some strings look like integers, but they are not. For example, the string "123", which is made up of the characters 1, 2 and 3, is not the same thing as the number 123. This assignment is illegal: