Relational Operators

In the following lesson, you will be introduced to relational operators.

Relational operators are operators that perform operations which compare operands of numeric types. For example, less than and greater than. Below is a list of the relational operators supported by Scala.

Operator Use
> Checks if the value of the left operand is greater than the value of the right operand
< Checks if the value of the left operand is less than the value of the right operand
>= Checks if the value of the left operand is greater than or equal to the value of the right operand
<= Checks if the value of the left operand is less than or equal to the value of the right operand
!= Checks if the values of the two operands are equal or not

Relational Operators yield a Boolean type result.

Taking the first operand to be 1010 and the second operand to be 77, let’s look at an example for each operator.

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val operand1 = 10
val operand2 = 7
println(operand1 > operand2)
println(operand1 < operand2)
println(operand1 >= operand2)
println(operand1 <= operand2)
println(operand1 != operand2)

We can also use relational operators on non-integer literals such as character literals. In this case, the compiler will compare the Unicode of the characters. Let’s look at an example where the first operand is a and the second operand is b. As a comes before b alphabetically, a would be less than b.

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val operand1 = 'a'
val operand2 = 'b'
println(operand1 > operand2)
println(operand1 < operand2)
println(operand1 >= operand2)
println(operand1 <= operand2)
println(operand1 != operand2)

That sums up relational operators, let’s move on to logical operators in the next lesson.