Understanding Relational Operators in C Relational operators in C are used to compare two values or expressions, yielding a result of true (1) or false (0). These include less than (<), greater than (>), less than or equal to (<=), greater than or equal to (>=), equality check (==), and inequality (!=). They play a crucial role in decision-making structures like if-else statements. Unlike assignment operators, relational ones evaluate conditions rather than assigning values.
Comparing Different Data Types with Relational Operators Relational operators can be applied not only on integers but also floating-point numbers and characters by comparing their ASCII values. However, they cannot directly compare strings as this would lead to undefined behavior due to memory address comparisons instead of content comparison. Floating-point comparisons using these operators should generally be avoided for high precision requirements since minor differences may yield incorrect results.
Syntax and Usage Examples of Relational Expressions A relational expression combines operands with relational operators; it evaluates based on precedence rules where arithmetic operations take priority over relations. For example: '3 < 5' yields true because 3 is indeed smaller while combining multiple such expressions requires understanding associativity from left-to-right evaluation order within the same precedence level.