Syntactically operators usually contrast to functions. In most languages, functions may be seen as a special form of prefix operator with fixed See more

The semantics of operators particularly depends on value, evaluation strategy, and argument passing mode (such as Boolean short … See more

Common examples that differ from functions syntactically are relational operators, e.g. ">" for "greater than", with names often outside the language's set of identifiers for functions, and called with a syntax different from the language's syntax for calling … See more

In some programming languages an operator may be ad hoc polymorphic, that is, have definitions for more than one kind of data, (such as in Java where the + operator is used both for the addition of numbers and for the concatenation of strings). Such an … See more

A language may contain a fixed number of built-in operators (e.g. +, -, *, <, <=, !, =, etc. in C and C++, PHP), or it may allow the creation of programmer-defined operators (e.g. See more

A compiler can implement operators and functions with subroutine calls or with inline code. Some built-in operators supported by a language have a direct mapping to a small number of instructions commonly found on central processing units, … See more

Some languages also allow for the operands of an operator to be implicitly converted, or coerced, to suitable data types for the operation to occur. For example, in See more