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Compound assignment operators

Compound assignment operators - Perl Tutorial

From the course: Perl 5 Essential Training

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Compound assignment operators

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- [Voiceover] The compound assignment operators are a nice convenience feature that was borrowed from the C language. Here is a working copy of hello.pl from chapter eight of the exercise files. For example, if I come down here and I create a variable, and assign it a value, so I now I've got $x is equal to seven. And let's say that I want to add two to this. I could say, $x equals $x plus two, and say $x, and I'll get nine, and that's correct. Or I could use the compound assignment operator, I can take this assignment and the addition and put them in one operator, and say, plus equals, x plus equals two. And you notice I get exactly the same result. So this both adds and assigns in one operator. So that's why it's called the compound assignment operator. It has the side effect of only evaluating $x once, and there are circumstances where that may matter. In other words, if I were doing this in two steps like this, it actually evaluates $x twice. And if that were a class or something…

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