Not to be cheeky, but this is entry level stuff. I think I learnt this before I went to university in fact, the use of bitwise evaluators that is. It’s a very handy technique when you need to perform operations in a conditional statement without having to nest statements or have else conditions, or just having arbitrarily placed calls.

Immediately seeing that code though I knew what it would print - perhaps universities around the world don’t pick up on stuff like this? But now it’s mentioned, most of my coding books apart from some heavy C++ stuff mentions bitwise operations.

Sorry, I meant to say most of my coding books apart from heavy C++ stuff DO NOT mention bitwise operations, or if they do, it’s extremely brief and considered irrelevant.

It’s a very handy technique when you need to perform operations in a conditional statement.

I disagree — it’s a terrible technique for that. It’s not that bitwise or is hard to understand. But you expect to see normal or. So unless you are watching carefully, that | is going to slip by unnoticed — until the bugs appear.

Like you say, most coding books overlook bitwise operations. They used to be handy for combining integer constants (both Swing and SWT do this quite a lot). But now we have enums, it’s safer to do constants with them, and use arrays to combine them.

It’s only a terrible technique if the programmer doesn’t know how to interpret it

HelloGoodbye?

I’m not sure if Java do the same thing with a OR C language does.

@Kezzer… this is an example of the cause for a very subtle bug, not an introduction to bitwise operators. It illustrates that in Java it’s easy to mistype a bitwise operator for a logical one (and get unexpected results).

If you didn’t know to look for something odd in that code, would you have spotted it? Be honest now… it’s a single character difference to what you’d usually see, and because it’s valid syntax, no IDE is going to flag it up.

Personally, I think it is such bad coding style to use bitwise operators with boolean values that IDEs should flag it up! I can’t think of a single situation where non-lazy evaluation of logical conditions would possibly be a good thing. I totally agree with Dan on this one.

I would have noticed it for the reason that it was my practise to use them originally. I wouldn’t use them now, and in fact, don’t use them now, but not for my sake, for the sake of others.

What I was originally getting at is that bitwise operations are a very basic construct learnt at entry-level programming. I had no intention of offending anyone and neither was I trying to demean anyone. Please, don’t take it so harshly

@Kezzer don’t worry, nobody’s offended… we’re just gob-smacked that you have used this as a technique in the past.

Sam, is it one of those lines of code you look at and literally cringe? I could say “I don’t know any better” then. You won’t find any of my current code, however, which uses this concept. Perhaps I’ve grown out of it, or just haven’t found a good use for it yet?

I noticed the logical OR, but just because I was looking for something weird.

I have a suggestion. You have pretty good links here… I’d be glad if you could tell us about great blogs on Java and new techonologies. Thanks.

@KesheR you mean go through our blogroll in detail? (btw… it was a bitwise OR, not a logical OR)