Literals and Operators

Introduction

In this lab, we explore the use of literals and operators in Rust. Literals such as integers, floats, characters, strings, booleans, and the unit type can be expressed using their literal forms. Integers can also be expressed in hexadecimal, octal, or binary notation. Underscores can be used to improve readability in numeric literals. Rust supports scientific E-notation for float literals. Operators such as addition, subtraction, logical operations, bitwise operations, and shift operations are available in Rust.

Note: If the lab does not specify a file name, you can use any file name you want. For example, you can use main.rs, compile and run it with rustc main.rs && ./main.

Skills Graph

Literals and operators

Integers 1, floats 1.2, characters 'a', strings "abc", booleans true and the unit type () can be expressed using literals.

Integers can, alternatively, be expressed using hexadecimal, octal or binary notation using these prefixes respectively: 0x, 0o or 0b.

Underscores can be inserted in numeric literals to improve readability, e.g. 1_000 is the same as 1000, and 0.000_001 is the same as 0.000001.

Rust also supports scientific E-notation, e.g. 1e6, 7.6e-4. The associated type is f64.

We need to tell the compiler the type of the literals we use. For now, we'll use the u32 suffix to indicate that the literal is an unsigned 32-bit integer, and the i32 suffix to indicate that it's a signed 32-bit integer.

The operators available and their precedence in Rust are similar to other C-like languages.

fn main() {
    // Integer addition
    println!("1 + 2 = {}", 1u32 + 2);

    // Integer subtraction
    println!("1 - 2 = {}", 1i32 - 2);
    // TODO ^ Try changing `1i32` to `1u32` to see why the type is important

    // Scientific notation
    println!("1e4 is {}, -2.5e-3 is {}", 1e4, -2.5e-3);

    // Short-circuiting boolean logic
    println!("true AND false is {}", true && false);
    println!("true OR false is {}", true || false);
    println!("NOT true is {}", !true);

    // Bitwise operations
    println!("0011 AND 0101 is {:04b}", 0b0011u32 & 0b0101);
    println!("0011 OR 0101 is {:04b}", 0b0011u32 | 0b0101);
    println!("0011 XOR 0101 is {:04b}", 0b0011u32 ^ 0b0101);
    println!("1 << 5 is {}", 1u32 << 5);
    println!("0x80 >> 2 is 0x{:x}", 0x80u32 >> 2);

    // Use underscores to improve readability!
    println!("One million is written as {}", 1_000_000u32);
}

Summary

Congratulations! You have completed the Literals and Operators lab. You can practice more labs in LabEx to improve your skills.