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I am familiar that statements do something and that expressions are a "collection of symbols that make up a quantity" (What is the difference between an expression and a statement in Python?). My question is: when you assign a value to a variable is that assignment a statement or an expression?
For example (in C):
int x = 5;
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Variable Assignment To "assign" a variable means to symbolically associate a specific piece of information with a name. Any operations that are applied to this "name" (or variable) must hold true for any possible values.
An assignment statement evaluates the expression list (remember that this can be a single expression or a comma-separated list, the latter yielding a tuple) and assigns the single resulting object to each of the target lists, from left to right.
In programming language terminology, an “expression” is a combination of values and functions that are combined and interpreted by the compiler to create a new value, as opposed to a “statement” which is just a standalone unit of execution and doesn't return anything.
Well, when you say
int x = 5;
that's a declaration, that happens to include an initialization.
But if you say
x = 5
that's an expression. And if you put a semicolon after it:
x = 5;
now it's a statement.
Expression statements are probably the most common type of statement in C programs. An expression statement is simply any expression, with a semicolon after it. So there are plenty of things that might look like some other kind of statement, that are really just expression statements. Perhaps the best example is the classic
printf("Hello, world!\n");
Many people probably think of this as a "print statement". But it's actually just another expression statement: a simple expression consisting of a single function call
printf("Hello, world!\n")
again followed by a semicolon.
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