What is the difference between & and && in Java?

& <-- verifies both operands
&& <-- stops evaluating if the first operand evaluates to false since the result will be false

(x != 0) & (1/x > 1) <-- this means evaluate (x != 0) then evaluate (1/x > 1) then do the &. the problem is that for x=0 this will throw an exception.

(x != 0) && (1/x > 1) <-- this means evaluate (x != 0) and only if this is true then evaluate (1/x > 1) so if you have x=0 then this is perfectly safe and won't throw any exception if (x != 0) evaluates to false the whole thing directly evaluates to false without evaluating the (1/x > 1).

EDIT:

exprA | exprB <-- this means evaluate exprA then evaluate exprB then do the |.

exprA || exprB <-- this means evaluate exprA and only if this is false then evaluate exprB and do the ||.

Besides not being a lazy evaluator by evaluating both operands, I think the main characteristics of bitwise operators compare each bytes of operands like in the following example:

int a = 4;int b = 7;System.out.println(a & b); // prints 4//meaning in an 32 bit system// 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000100// 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000111// ===================================// 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000100

boolean a, b;Operation     Meaning                       Note---------     -------                       ----   a && b     logical AND                    short-circuiting   a || b     logical OR                     short-circuiting   a &  b     boolean logical AND            not short-circuiting   a |  b     boolean logical OR             not short-circuiting   a ^  b     boolean logical exclusive OR  !a          logical NOTshort-circuiting        (x != 0) && (1/x > 1)   SAFEnot short-circuiting    (x != 0) &  (1/x > 1)   NOT SAFE