Is it good practice to use the XOR (^) operator in Java for boolean checks?

Posted by Pete on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Pete
Published on 2008-10-02T02:58:12Z Indexed on 2010/04/10 8:43 UTC
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I personally like the 'exclusive or' operator when it makes sense in context of boolean checks because of its conciseness. I much prefer to write

if (boolean1 ^ boolean2)
{
  //do it
}

than

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

but I often get confused looks (from other experienced java developers, not just the newbies), and sometimes comments about how it should only be used for bitwise operations. I'm curious as to the best practices others use around the '^' operator.

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