An expression tells JavaScript what to do with the data it gets, and within each expression are operators and operands. Operands are the data or data types the expression gets, and operators are the shorthand characters that tell the expression what to do with the operand. JavaScript has arithmetic (+,-,*,/), assignment (=), bitwise (&, |), comparison (>, <,), logical (&, ||, !), special (., []), and string (+) operators. Operators are a feature of many programming and scripting languages. At first there were a relatively limited menu of operators to use in JavaScript, but version 1.2 allowed for the support of regular expressions and a group of operators large enough to compare to other scripting languages.