Java provides a conditional-and and a conditional-or operator, that both take one or two operands of type boolean and produce a boolean result. These are:

• && - the conditional-AND operator,
• || - the conditional-OR operators. The evaluation of <left-expr> && <right-expr> is equivalent to the following pseudo-code:

{
       boolean L = evaluate(<left-expr>);
       if (L) {
           return evaluate(<right-expr>);
       } else {
           // short-circuit the evaluation of the 2nd operand expression
           return false;
       }
    }

The evaluation of <left-expr> || <right-expr> is equivalent to the following pseudo-code:

{
       boolean L = evaluate(<left-expr>);
       if (!L) {
           return evaluate(<right-expr>);
       } else {
           // short-circuit the evaluation of the 2nd operand expression
           return true;
       }
    }

As the pseudo-code above illustrates, the behavior of the short-circuit operators are equivalent to using if / else statements.

Example - using && as a guard in an expression

The following example shows the most common usage pattern for the && operator. Compare these two versions of a method to test if a supplied Integer is zero.

public boolean isZero(Integer value) {
    return value == 0;
}

public boolean isZero(Integer value) {
    return value != null && value == 0;
}

The first version works in most cases, but if the value argument is null, then a NullPointerException will be thrown.

In the second version we have added a “guard” test. The value != null && value == 0 expression is evaluated by first performing the value != null test. If the null test succeeds (i.e. it evaluates to true) then the value == 0 expression is evaluated. If the null test fails, then the evaluation of value == 0 is skipped (short-circuited), and we don’t get a NullPointerException.

Example - using && to avoid a costly calculation

The following example shows how && can be used to avoid a relatively costly calculation:

public boolean verify(int value, boolean needPrime) {
    return !needPrime | isPrime(value);
}

public boolean verify(int value, boolean needPrime) {
    return !needPrime || isPrime(value);
}

In the first version, both operands of the | will always be evaluated, so the (expensive) isPrime method will be called unnecessarily. The second version avoids the unnecessary call by using || instead of |.