Understand the Real Difference between Operator and Operand

Breaking down the concepts of operators and operands

Yeran Kods

Published in

Nerd For Tech

2 min readAug 4, 2023

Operators

Operators are symbols or keywords in programming that perform operations on one or more values (operands) and produce a result. They are used to perform tasks like addition, subtraction, multiplication, comparison, etc.

Operands

Operands are the values or variables that operators work on. They are the data that the operators manipulate to produce a result.

Here’s a simple example using the addition operator (+):

5 + 3

In this example:

5 and 3 are operands.
+ is the operator that performs the addition operation on the operands.

The result of this expression would be 8, which is the outcome of the addition operation on the operands 5 and 3.

Now let’s consider a more complex example involving multiple operators and operands:

(10 + 5) / (2 * 3)

Breaking it down step by step:

The expression (10 + 5) involves the addition operator + and has operands 10 and 5. The result of this addition is 15.
The expression (2 * 3) involves the multiplication operator * and has operands 2 and 3. The result of this multiplication is 6.
Finally, we perform the division operation / between the results of the previous two expressions, which are 15 and 6. The result of this division is 2.5.

10, 5, 2, and 3 are operands.
+, /, and * are operators.

This example demonstrates how multiple operators and operands can be combined to create more complex expressions, and how the operators perform different operations on the operands to produce a final result.

In summary:

Operators are symbols or keywords that perform operations on values.
Operands are the values or variables that operators work on.

Remember, operators and operands are fundamental concepts in programming and are used extensively to perform various tasks in code.

Hope you learned something new.❤️

Connect with me via;