It’s missing the double-equals. So it’s doing an assignment instead of an equality comparison (and remember, the return value of an assignment is the new value). In most cases, the fact that most types are not boolean means the result is not a boolean and so it becomes illegal for an if
statement, resulting in a compiler error. However, since the type here is already a boolean, the assignment results in a boolean and so the safety-check fails. Thus, b = true
means that b
is assigned the value true
and this is the value that is returned and checked by the if
statement.