An
operator is a representation
of an operation, such as addition, to be carried out on one or two
terms. The following
pages describe how each operator (except
for the prefix operators) acts on two terms, which may be symbols,
strings, function calls, intermediate results, or subexpressions.
Each prefix operator acts on the term or subexpression that follows
it. Blanks (and comments) adjacent to operator characters have no
effect on the operator; thus, operators constructed from more than
one character can have embedded blanks and comments. In addition,
one or more blanks, where they occur in expressions but are not adjacent
to another operator, also act as an operator. There are four types
of operators:
- Concatenation
- Arithmetic
- Comparison
- Logical