groovy ^ operator

Question

When given two boolean arguments, the ^ operator performs exclusive or, e.g.

true ^ true == false
true ^ false == true
false ^ true == true
false ^ false == false

When given two numeric arguments, it does something, but I've no idea what. At first I thought it was modular division because

(5 ^ 5) == 0

However

(10 ^ 4) == 14

So it's not modular division, is it some kind of bit-shifting?

It's bitwise exclusive or, same as Java http://stackoverflow.com/questions/460542/operator-in-java — Rag, Aug 17 '11 at 15:04

score 12 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 17 '11 at 15:02

12

^ does the same thing as it does in Java and most other languages:

It's a bitwise exclusive OR (short: bitwise XOR)

This means that for every bit in the binary representation of the two numbers the resulting bit in the output will be the bit_in_first_value ^ bit_in_second_value.

answered Aug 17 '11 at 15:02

Joachim Sauer

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Indeed, to my knowledge all langauges strongly derived from C have this prescribed behavior of their XOR operators. E.G. `perl -le 'print(10 ^ 4)'` prints out 14. Groovy and Perl occupy a similar ecological nice, so much so that [Groovy’s version](http://pleac.sourceforge.net/pleac_groovy/index.html) was the first out of dozens of languages whose translation of the *Perl Cookbook* is complete in the [PLEAC — Programming Language Examples Alike Cookbook](http://pleac.sourceforge.net/) repository on Sourceforge. OCaml was the second. Python is at 85% and Ruby at only 65%. Groovy is easy and fun. – tchrist Aug 17 '11 at 15:12

groovy ^ operator

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