Assignment and Shorthand Operators

Shorthand Operators

Statements like this:

a = a + 10;

are used a lot in programs. Java provides shorthand operators to combine the arithmetic and assignment operator into a single operator and write the above statement like this:

a += 10;

Both these statements are equivalent. They add 10 to a and assign the value back to a. The second statement uses the shorthand operator and is a little simple and saves a bit of typing.

There are shorthand operators for all arithmetic binary operators. The table below lists some of the shorthand operators in Java:

Let’s look at a BlueJ program to see some examples of Shorthand operator’s usage:

public class ShorthandOp
{
    public void demoShorthandOp() {
        
        int x = 10, y = 20, z = 30;
        
        x += 20;    //Same as x = x + 20
        y *= 3;     //Same as y = y * 3
        z -= 15;    //Same as z = z - 15
        z += x * y; //Same as z = z + (x * y)
        z %= 7;     //Same as z = z % 7
        
        System.out.println("x = " + x);
        System.out.println("y = " + y);
        System.out.println("z = " + z);
    }
}

Here is the output of the program: