Logic
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Jesus, why do people pretend to know the absolute truth about things without even bothering to do some minimal research. What you are stating is completely wrong. The
&operator is an OVERLOADABLE operator. As such, it has predefined behaviours for integral types and boolean types.(int & int)IS NOT THE SAME ASbool & bool. The first performs a logical bitwise AND operation while the latter performs a LOGICAL AND operation. There is no bitwise operation at all if the operator is dealing with two booleans. It is exactly the same asbool && boolexcept that both terms are evaluated no matter what the first expression evaluates to. If you are not convinced then please read the following MSDN C# reference link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sbf85k1c.aspx[^] or better yet: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2a723cdk.aspx[^]Come on, guys. Stop this mess, ok? I don't pretend to know the absolute truth about this but, man, you are wrong or, at least, you might be confusing beginners. The fact that, as you say, "both terms are evaluated no matter what the first expression evaluates to" with the & operator is the key, and it is not a trivial difference. See this example:
string s = null;
bool b1 = s != null && s.Length == 0;
bool b2 = s != null & s.Length == 0;You see the operands here are boolean expressions. However, while b1 would be assigned false without any problem, a runtime NullReferenceException would be thrown when trying to assing the value to b2. This is a really important difference. Both operands are not the same and can never be considered as if they were the same. Under some circumstances they can return the same result, yes, but that does not mean that they are exactly the same or that you can use any of them when you use boolean expressions. Can we, please, go on with our lifes now?
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Jesus, why do people pretend to know the absolute truth about things without even bothering to do some minimal research. What you are stating is completely wrong. The
&operator is an OVERLOADABLE operator. As such, it has predefined behaviours for integral types and boolean types.(int & int)IS NOT THE SAME ASbool & bool. The first performs a logical bitwise AND operation while the latter performs a LOGICAL AND operation. There is no bitwise operation at all if the operator is dealing with two booleans. It is exactly the same asbool && boolexcept that both terms are evaluated no matter what the first expression evaluates to. If you are not convinced then please read the following MSDN C# reference link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sbf85k1c.aspx[^] or better yet: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2a723cdk.aspx[^]I'm just a novice programmer and didn't even realize (or I forgot?) that & was a legal command. I've always just used &&. I'm so confused by the last 30 some posts, I'm going to keep it simple and make sure I never use &.
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I'm just a novice programmer and didn't even realize (or I forgot?) that & was a legal command. I've always just used &&. I'm so confused by the last 30 some posts, I'm going to keep it simple and make sure I never use &.
Wise decision!
Real men don't use instructions. They are only the manufacturers opinion on how to put the thing together. Manfred R. Bihy: "Looks as if OP is learning resistant."
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Come on, guys. Stop this mess, ok? I don't pretend to know the absolute truth about this but, man, you are wrong or, at least, you might be confusing beginners. The fact that, as you say, "both terms are evaluated no matter what the first expression evaluates to" with the & operator is the key, and it is not a trivial difference. See this example:
string s = null;
bool b1 = s != null && s.Length == 0;
bool b2 = s != null & s.Length == 0;You see the operands here are boolean expressions. However, while b1 would be assigned false without any problem, a runtime NullReferenceException would be thrown when trying to assing the value to b2. This is a really important difference. Both operands are not the same and can never be considered as if they were the same. Under some circumstances they can return the same result, yes, but that does not mean that they are exactly the same or that you can use any of them when you use boolean expressions. Can we, please, go on with our lifes now?
Gets my five - nicely argued.
Real men don't use instructions. They are only the manufacturers opinion on how to put the thing together. Manfred R. Bihy: "Looks as if OP is learning resistant."
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Wise decision!
Real men don't use instructions. They are only the manufacturers opinion on how to put the thing together. Manfred R. Bihy: "Looks as if OP is learning resistant."
Agreed! That is of course only if he meant to say: "I'll never use & with boolean operands." :-D
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This should really mess with your noggin:
bool isTrue = true || true && false; // True
bool isFalse = true | true && false; // False.Also, given your example, I'd prefer the double ampersand for 2 reasons: 1) for short-circuiting and 2) for standards' sake.
Ahem! The real Hall of Shame is the lack of brackets - pure laziness without realizing a simple misstyping mistiping mistyping can change the behaviour of code. ...most people are not a programming god who knows all precedence rules!
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Agreed! That is of course only if he meant to say: "I'll never use & with boolean operands." :-D
That's how I read it. :-D
Real men don't use instructions. They are only the manufacturers opinion on how to put the thing together. Manfred R. Bihy: "Looks as if OP is learning resistant."
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Agreed! That is of course only if he meant to say: "I'll never use & with boolean operands." :-D
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Jesus, why do people pretend to know the absolute truth about things without even bothering to do some minimal research. What you are stating is completely wrong. The
&operator is an OVERLOADABLE operator. As such, it has predefined behaviours for integral types and boolean types.(int & int)IS NOT THE SAME ASbool & bool. The first performs a logical bitwise AND operation while the latter performs a LOGICAL AND operation. There is no bitwise operation at all if the operator is dealing with two booleans. It is exactly the same asbool && boolexcept that both terms are evaluated no matter what the first expression evaluates to. If you are not convinced then please read the following MSDN C# reference link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sbf85k1c.aspx[^] or better yet: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2a723cdk.aspx[^]Well f. me sideways and call me Dr Dream. You come and tell me that I don't know what I'm saying and immediately say what I said. Bitwise means EVERYTHING is evaluated and then anded ored noted xored and stuck through the mincer. Binary menas once the result is known it stops. I appologise if using technical terms confussed you but that's it.
Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done. or "Drink. Get drunk. Fall over." - P O'H OK, I will win to day or my name isn't Ethel Crudacre! - DD Ethel Crudacre Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb -- they're often *students*, for heaven's sake. -- (Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett)
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Again, what makes you think I don't know the difference between & and &&?! I never said they do the same thing and I do know that && is the most commonly used. That, however, does not make it wrong to use & between two boolean and it does not invalidate the fact that in that case it makes no difference. And if someone says it does then they should RTFM!
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So if I have this straight, in your example:
if(UsernameTextBox.Text == "Manager" & PasswordTextBox.Text == "Maintenance")
because both arguments are boolean, the '&' is effectively acting just like a '&&' except for being trivially less efficient because it is always doing both of the string compares. I know in this case you were merely quoting previous post using '&', but even if the non-short-circuit behaviour would be useful sometime, I'd avoid it because it just looks wrong to me. We're in a mixed C++/C# environment here, and I have to be on the lookout for misused '&'s in the code as it is. Allowing for false positives is not in the cards here. That said, I think you got a raw deal.
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And quite rightly so. While for booleans, & can work as a logical operator, in all other cases it is bitwise. For consistency, use a single operatopr to represent logical operators throughout, the C# designers (C really) chose && for this purpose. It may work, but its obfuscated, and should be rejected or corrected by any reasonable code review, regardless of any appeals you make to technical documentation.
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And quite rightly so. While for booleans, & can work as a logical operator, in all other cases it is bitwise. For consistency, use a single operatopr to represent logical operators throughout, the C# designers (C really) chose && for this purpose. It may work, but its obfuscated, and should be rejected or corrected by any reasonable code review, regardless of any appeals you make to technical documentation.
Rob, I think the problem is that you are assuming human beings are rational/reasonable. Where I am currently, I have to fill out a form and get authorization to fix a simple memory leak. The code base is several million lines of C++, suffering from 20 years of technical debt. Since I already have a reputation for being "too critical about code quality" which causes my input to get knocked down a level or two, I have to bite my tongue a lot. It's a grand learning experience, but I'll be glad when I figure out what the lesson is!
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Rob, I think the problem is that you are assuming human beings are rational/reasonable. Where I am currently, I have to fill out a form and get authorization to fix a simple memory leak. The code base is several million lines of C++, suffering from 20 years of technical debt. Since I already have a reputation for being "too critical about code quality" which causes my input to get knocked down a level or two, I have to bite my tongue a lot. It's a grand learning experience, but I'll be glad when I figure out what the lesson is!
The lesson : Never start a fight in the Hall of Shame :laugh:
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Fabio V Silva wrote:
If you're working as C# developer I think you should RTFM.
No need to be impolite.
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Again, you're wrong, they are both logical operators in that case but one is short-circuited and the other is not! You have the same think in VB with the
And,AndAlso,Or,OrElseoperators, they are all handy in different situations. -
'AND' in VB is not equivalent to '&' in C#, but equivalent '&&'. this is applicable for OR also... Only difference is 'AND' is not short circuited where '&&' is short circuited. To achieve short circuited and VB require explicit usage of 'AND ALSO'
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Again, you're wrong, they are both logical operators in that case but one is short-circuited and the other is not! You have the same think in VB with the
And,AndAlso,Or,OrElseoperators, they are all handy in different situations. -
It is your mistake that you are using
&like a logical operator. It is NOT supposed to be used as a logical operator, we have&&for that purpose.http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa691306%28v=vs.71%29.aspx[^] This (from Microsoft) includes & and | in the logical operators. And semantics aside, they can and sometimes should be used as such in C# - for those cases where you want a logical operator without short-circuiting (i.e. one of the operands is a method call with side-effects - which would be a whole nother type of questionable practice, but the language allows it and it has is uses). So in that sense the OP is correct, & and && do the same thing except && short-circuits. Of course, they don't do exactly the same thing, because & can also be used on non-boolean types as a bitwise operator. So (4 & 5) is meaningful, whereas 4 && 5 is not.
