Is it good practice to use the xor operator for boolean checks? [closed]

Answer 1

As a bitwise operator, xor is much faster than any other means to replace it. So for performance critical and scalable calculations, xor is imperative.

My subjective personal opinion: It is absolutely forbidden, for any purpose, to use equality (== or !=) for booleans. Using it shows lack of basic programming ethics and fundamentals. Anyone who gives you confused looks over ^ should be sent back to the basics of boolean algebra (I was tempted to write "to the rivers of belief" here :) ).

Answer 2

if((boolean1 && !boolean2) || (boolean2 && !boolean1)) 
{ 
  //do it 
} 

IMHO this code could be simplified:

if(boolean1 != boolean2) 
{ 
  //do it 
} 

Answer 3

I think it'd be okay if you commented it, e.g. // ^ == XOR.

Answer 4

!= is OK to compare two variables. It doesn't work, though, with multiple comparisons.

Answer 5

I recently used an xor in a JavaScript project at work and ended up adding 7 lines of comments to explain what was going on. The justification for using xor in that context was that one of the terms (term1 in the example below) could take on not two but three values: undefined, true or false while the other (term2) could be true or false. I would have had to add an additional check for the undefined cases but with xor, the following was sufficient since the xor forces the first term to be first evaluated as a Boolean, letting undefined get treated as false:

if (term1 ^ term2) { ...

It was, in the end, a bit of an overkill, but I wanted to keep it in there anyway, as sort of an easter egg.

Answer 6

I personally prefer the "boolean1 ^ boolean2" expression due to its succinctness.

If I was in your situation (working in a team), I would strike a compromise by encapsulating the "boolean1 ^ boolean2" logic in a function with a descriptive name such as "isDifferent(boolean1, boolean2)".

For example, instead of using "boolean1 ^ boolean2", you would call "isDifferent(boolean1, boolean2)" like so:

if (isDifferent(boolean1, boolean2))
{
  //do it
}

Your "isDifferent(boolean1, boolean2)" function would look like:

private boolean isDifferent(boolean1, boolean2)
{
    return boolean1 ^ boolean2;
}

Of course, this solution entails the use of an ostensibly extraneous function call, which in itself is subject to Best Practices scrutiny, but it avoids the verbose (and ugly) expression "(boolean1 && !boolean2) || (boolean2 && !boolean1)"!