Why is a Java ternary "evaluated" before an or?

Question

I have the following Java code snippet that is returning false when I would expect it to return true:

assertTrue(true || false ? false : false);

The statement has been dumbed down for the sake of this post (it was originally using string comparisons), and I know it can be simplified to not use the ternary operator, but basically I'm trying to figure out why Java evaluates it like this:

(true || false) ? false : false

rather than this:

true || (false ? false : false)

I would expect it to evaluate the true and exit. Does anyone know why it doesn't?

Answer 1

Because of operator precedence. Logical AND and Logical OR have higher precedence than the ternary operator, so they act first.