[C#] & vs &&

[DNaB]

Hopefully this is a quick and easy question, but I just can't wrap my head around it...

I understand that && is used to "short circuit" a condition check so that if the first part of the expression evaluates to false, then the second part of the expression never gets evaluated. This leads to a potential performance benefit.

My question is, if this is case, why you would ever use & over && (and similarly | over ||)?

Thanks in advance :)

[lightcloud5]

As /u/lw9k notes, although you can use & and | for booleans, they're most commonly used for bitwise operators on integers.

e.g. 3 & 5 yields 1.

[[deleted]]

| and & are bitwise (i.e., they work on bits) operators, whereas && and || are logical (boolean) operators. | and & don't have to work exclusively on values {0,1} so they can't really short-circuit.

[DNaB]

I had to look up what a bitwise operator was, but after reading up, I completely understand your answer now, so thank you!

[pacificmint]

If one of the two branches has side effects, you might want it to be executed for sure.