I always thought that &&
operator in Java is used for verifying whether both its boolean operands are true
, and the &
operator is used to do Bit-wise operations on two integer types.
Recently I came to know that &
operator can also be used verify whether both its boolean operands are true
, the only difference being that it checks the RHS operand even if the LHS operand is false.
Is the &
operator in Java internally overloaded? Or is there some other concept behind this?
& <-- verifies both operands
&& <-- stops evaluating if the first operand evaluates to false since the result will be false
(x != 0) & (1/x > 1)
<-- this means evaluate (x != 0)
then evaluate (1/x > 1)
then do the &. the problem is that for x=0 this will throw an exception.
(x != 0) && (1/x > 1)
<-- this means evaluate (x != 0)
and only if this is true then evaluate (1/x > 1)
so if you have x=0 then this is perfectly safe and won't throw any exception if (x != 0) evaluates to false the whole thing directly evaluates to false without evaluating the (1/x > 1)
.
EDIT:
exprA | exprB
<-- this means evaluate exprA
then evaluate exprB
then do the |
.
exprA || exprB
<-- this means evaluate exprA
and only if this is false
then evaluate exprB
and do the ||
.