C# For Beginners Lesson 28 - Decision Making and Relational Operators

The relational operators compare values to one other. The comparison operators are =, <>, <, >, <=, and >=. All of the relational operators result in aBoolean value.

The relational operators have the following general meaning:

• The = operator tests whether the two operands are equal.
• The <> operator tests whether the two operands are not equal.
• The < operator tests whether the first operand is less than the second operand.
• The > operator tests whether the first operand is greater than the second operand.
• The <= operator tests whether the first operand is less than or equal to the second operand.
• The >= operator tests whether the first operand is greater than or equal to the second operand.

The relational operators are defined for the following types:

• Boolean. The operators compare the truth values of the two operands. True is considered to be less than False, which matches with their numeric values.
• Byte, Short, Integer, and Long. The operators compare the numeric values of the two integral operands.
• Single and Double. The operators compare the operands according to the rules of the IEEE 754 standard.
• Decimal. The operators compare the numeric values of the two decimal operands.
• Date. The operators return the result of comparing the two date/time values.
• Char. The operators return the result of comparing the two Unicode values.
• String. The operators return the result of comparing the two values using either a binary comparison or a text comparison. The comparison used is determined by the compilation environment and the Option Compare statement. A binary comparison determines whether the numeric Unicode value of each character in each string is the same. A text comparison does a Unicode text comparison based on the current culture in use on the .NET Framework. When doing a string comparison, a null reference is equivalent to the string literal "".

RelationalOperatorExpression ::=
   Expression = Expression |
   Expression < > Expression |
   Expression < Expression |
   Expression > Expression |
   Expression < = Expression |
   Expression > = Expression