What are the cases in which it is better to use unconditional AND (& instead of &&)

Question

I\'d like to know some cases in Java (or more generally: in programming) when it is preferred in boolean expressions to use the unconditional AND (&

Answer 1

The && allows the jvm to do short circuit evaluation. That is, if the first argument is false, then it doesn't need to bother checking the second argument.

A single & will run both sides regardless.

So, as a contrived example, you might have:

if (account.isAllowed() & logAccountAndCheckFlag(account))
    // Do something

In that example, you might always want to log the fact that the owner of the account attempted to do something.

I don't think I have ever used a single & in commercial programming though.