Why use & over &&?

Question

I know what & and | does - it evaluates both sides (or all conditions if more than 2) - but I can't say I've used those two operators for a very long time, I always used && and ||.

e.g. (a != null) & (a.length == 1) would throw if we're checking the length of a after we know it's null, and obviously (a != null) && (a.length == 1) would just return false if a was null without the need to check if the length of a is 1. I also know there's a slight performance benefit to using && and || if you have many conditions to check returning true/false at condition 2/100 is faster than evaluating all 100 knowing it's true/false at condition 2.

What situations would require the single &and | operands?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8418295/logical-vs-bitwise — Jasmeet, Dec 15 '20 at 05:26
Hope the first example [here](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4163483/what-is-the-difference-between-and-operators-in-c-sharp) answers your question fully. Just try to use Google next time firstly — SelfishCrawler, Dec 15 '20 at 05:27
Which programming language is this? Please add a corresponding tag — Bernardo Costa, Jun 09 '21 at 13:25

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 15 '20 at 05:33

&& and || is the logical AND or OR between two predicates. This is why it could be more efficient as with logical AND or OR we can do Short-circuit evaluation.

On the other side, & and | applies a bitwise AND or OR. This does not use Short-circuit evaluation. The use of this is generally less to do with the checking against predicates, and more to do with bit based operations such as bit-masking.

Why use & over &&?

1 Answers1