Difference between | and || , or & and && [duplicate]

Question

These are two simple samples in C++ written on Dev-cpp C++ 5.4.2:

float a, b, c;

if (a | b  & a | c)
   printf("x = %.2f\tF = %.0f\n", x, F);
else
   printf("x = %.2f\tF = %.2f\n", x, F);

and this code :

float a, b, c;

if (a || b  && a || c)
   printf("x = %.2f\tF = %.0f\n", x, F);
else
   printf("x = %.2f\tF = %.2f\n", x, F);

Can somebody tell my difference between || > | and & > &&. The second code works , but first does not. And compiler gives an error message :

[Error] invalid operands of types 'float' and 'float' to binary 'operator&'.

Answer 1

The operators |, &, and ~ act on individual bits in parallel. They can be used only on integer types. a | b does an independent OR operation of each bit of a with the corresponding bit of b to generate that bit of the result.

The operators ||, &&, and ! act on each entire operand as a single true/false value. Any data type can be used that implicitly converts to bool. Many data types, including float implicitly convert to bool with an implied !=0 operation.

|| and && also "short circuit". That means whenever the value of the result can be determined by just the first operand, the second is not evaluated. Example:

ptr && (*ptr==7) If ptr is zero, the result is false without any risk of seg faulting by dereferencing zero.

You could contrast that with (int)ptr & (*ptr). Ignoring the fact that this would be a bizarre operation to even want, if (int)ptr were zero, the entire result would be zero, so a human might think you don't need the second operand in that case. But the program will likely compute both anyway.