The GAWK Manual - Assignment Ops Go to the previous , next section. An assignment is an expression that stores a new value into a variable. After this expression is executed, the variable z has the value 1. Whatever old value z had before the assignment is forgotten.
Assignments can store string values also.
It is the simplest assignment operator because the value of the right-hand operand is stored unchanged. If you ignore the value, you might as well not use the operator. We call this a side effect . These are all called lvalues , which means they can appear on the left-hand side of an assignment operator. It is important to note that variables do not have permanent types.