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coperatorsdereferenceunary-operator

"The only operator that gives back a value is the de-referencing operator"

So I am a beginner to C. I was going through text about l-value and r-value when I came across this in one of my study materials:

"We talk about l-value and r-value with respect to assignment operator =. The only operator which gives a value back is the dereferencing operator."

This confuses me because don't the increment/decrement operators also give a value? Then how is dereferencing the only operator that gives a value back?

Solution

  • I think this is a typo and is supposed to say

    The only operator which gives an l-value back is the dereferencing operator.

    It isn't strictly true. For example, the [], . and -> operators also give back lvalues (the standard spells it without a hyphen) so that you can write

    a[5] = 17;
s.x = 42;
p->y = 17;