Using Caché ObjectScript - InterSystems Documentation

5
Operators and Expressions
Caché supports many different operators, which perform various actions, including mathematical actions, logical comparisons,
and so on. Operators act on expressions, which are variables or other entities that ultimately evaluated to a value. This
chapter describes expressions and the various ObjectScript operators. It contains the following topics:
• Introduction to Operators and Expressions
• Arithmetic Operators
• Logical Comparison Operators
• String Operators
• Numeric Relational Operators
• String Relational Operators
• Pattern Matching
• Indirection
5.1 Introduction to Operators and Expressions
Operators are symbolic characters that specify the action to be performed on their associated operands. Each operand
consists of one or more expressions or expression atoms. When used together, an operator and its associated operands have
the following form:
[operand] operator operand
Some operators take only one operand and are known as unary operators; others take two operands and are known as binary
operators.
An operator and any of its operands taken together constitute an expression. Such expressions produce a result that is the
effect of the operator on the operand(s). They are classified based on the types of operators they contain.
• An arithmetic expression contains arithmetic operators, gives a numeric interpretation to the operands, and produces
a numeric result.
• A string expression contains string operators, gives a string interpretation to the operands, and produces a string result.
• A logical expression contains relational and logical operators, gives a logical interpretation to the operands, and produces
a boolean result: TRUE (1) or FALSE (0).
Using Caché ObjectScript 31