Comparison Operators

We often need to compare values when programming, and there’s a number of ways to do this.

Equality

The equality operator can be used to check if two values are equal to each other. Most programming languages use the double-equals operator (==) to check for equality.

For example, if we wanted to know if the variable answer is $42$, we could write:

answer == 42;

This would return true if the answer was $42$ and false if it wasn’t.

Why double-equals and not a single equals sign? Recall that we learned that the single equals sign was used for assignment. This means that the following code will assign the value of 42 to the variable answer, rather than check if they are equal:

answer = 42;

Assigning values instead ...