UNDERSTANDING OPERATORS

An operator is a basic code element that performs some operation on one or more values to create a result. The values the operator acts upon are called operands. For example, in the following statement, the operator is + (addition), the operands are B and C, and the result is assigned to the variable A:

A = B + C

The Visual Basic operators fall into five categories: arithmetic, concatenation, comparison, logical, and bitwise. This chapter first explains these categories and the operators they contain, and then discusses other operator issues such as precedence, assignment operators, and operator overloading. Also included are discussions of some specialized issues that arise when you work with strings and dates.