Why '&&' and not '&'?

Question

Why is && preferable to & and || preferable to |?

I asked someone who\'s been programming for years a

Answer 1

Quickest (and slightly dumbed down) way to explain this to people who do not NEED to know the exact operations of the code when doing this is

&& is doing a check on each of those conditions Until it finds a false and returns the entire outcome as false

|| is doing a check on each of those conditions Until it finds a true and returns the entire outcome as true.

& is doing MATHS based apon BOTH/ALL the conditions and dealing with the outcome.

| is doing MATHS based apon BOTH/ALL the conditions and dealing with the outcome.

I've never come across a point where I have needed to use & or | within an if statement. I mostly use it for cutting up Hexadecimal values into its component colours using bitwise shift.

EG:

r = fullvalue >> 0xFF & 0xFF;
g = fullvalue >> 0xF & 0xFF;
b = fullvalue & 0xFF;

Within this operation "& 0xFF" is forcing to only look at of the binary value. I have not personally found a use for | yet though.