Boolean operators vs Bitwise operators

Question

I am confused as to when I should use Boolean vs bitwise operators

• and vs &
• or vs |

Answer 1

Boolean 'and' vs. Bitwise '&':

Pseudo-code/Python helped me understand the difference between these:

def boolAnd(A, B):
    # boolean 'and' returns either A or B
    if A == False:
        return A
    else:
        return B

def bitwiseAnd(A , B):
    # binary representation (e.g. 9 is '1001', 1 is '0001', etc.)

    binA = binary(A)
    binB = binary(B)



    # perform boolean 'and' on each pair of binaries in (A, B)
    # then return the result:
    # equivalent to: return ''.join([x*y for (x,y) in zip(binA, binB)])

    # assuming binA and binB are the same length
    result = []
    for i in range(len(binA)):
      compar = boolAnd(binA[i], binB[i]) 
      result.append(compar)

    # we want to return a string of 1s and 0s, not a list

    return ''.join(result)