[Solved] If a = b, what happens if each value changes respectively?

Question

What happens to b?

Nothing happens to b.

When you do

a = b;

you’re copying the value stored in b and putting it in a. (You’re not making a an alias of b.)

When you then do a += 1; you’re changing the value stored in a (and the value stored in b remains unchanged).

You can verify this by printing the final values after your code snippet:

System.out.println(a);  // prints 8
System.out.println(b);  // prints 7

What happens if you change the variable b, or what if you change a. What does the order have to do with anything.

a and b are two independent variables and changing one will never affect the other.

The order matters since when you do a = b the value of b is copied into a and whatever a stored before is discarded. If you had done a += 1 prior to a = b, then a would have been restored to 7 again.

Accepted Answer