2. Assignment Operators

Assignment operators assign values.

For the AQA exam board, the most common pseudocode assignment operator is the back pointing arrow which is the equivalent of =

An operator always acts on at least one item, which is called the 'argument' of the operator.

In the case of assignment, ? copies the value of its right argument into the argument on its left.

MyVariable  2

This assigns the value 2 to the variable named 'MyVariable'.

The assignment operator can also copy a value from one variable to another. For example

MyVariable  AnotherVariable

Because of the right-to-left rule, that statement is going to copy the value of the right variable AnotherVariable into the variable on the left MyVariable - not the other way around.

Because of the assigment operator, you can write code to carry out calculations and assign the result to a single variable, like this

MyVariable  AnotherVariable + 3 + Age

In the code above the + operator is adding up the arguments on the right hand side of ?, then the ? operator assigns the result to the argument on its left: MyVariable.

In many actual programming languages, the symbol "=" is used for assignment. But your exams will always use "".