15. Expressions

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CHAPTER 15

Expressions

When you can measure what you are speaking about,
and express it in numbers, you know something about it;
but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers,
your knowledge of it is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind:
it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely,
in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science.
—William Thompson, Lord Kelvin

Much of the work in a Java program is done by evaluating expressions, either for their side effects, such as assignments to variables, or for their values, which can be used as arguments or operands in larger expressions, or to affect the execution sequence in statements, or both.

This chapter specifies the meanings of Java expressions and the rules for their evaluation.