It is necessary to understand how C expresses logical relations. C treats logic as being arithmetical expression. The value 0 (zero) represents false, and all other values represent true. Code written by people uncomfortable with the C language can often be identified by the usage of #define to make a "TRUE" value. Because logic is arithmetic in C, arithmetic operators and logical operators are one and the same. there are a number of operators that are typically associated with logic:
Relational and Equivalence Expressions:
a < b
1 if a is less than b, 0 otherwise.
a > b
1 if a is greater than b, 0 otherwise.
a <= b
1 if a is less than or equal to b, 0 otherwise.
a >= b
1 if a is greater than or equal to b, 0 otherwise.
a == b
1 if a is equal to b, 0 otherwise.
a != b
1 if a is not equal to b, 0 otherwise
C does not have a dedicated Boolean type as many other languages do. 0 means false and anything else true. Often #define TRUE 1 and #define FALSE 0 are used to work around the lack of a Boolean type. It is a better idea to indicate what you are actually expecting as a result from a function call, as there are many different ways of indicating error conditions, depending on the situation. Another thing to note is that the relational expressions do not evaluate as they would in mathematical texts.
Logical Expressions
a || b
when EITHER a or b is true (or both), the result is 1, otherwise the result is 0.
a && b
when BOTH a and b are true, the result is 1, otherwise the result is 0.
!a
when a is true, the result is 0, when a is 0, the result is 1.
C uses short circuit evaluation of logical expressions. That is to say, once it is able to determine the truth of a logical expression, it does no further evaluation. we need not worry here about trying to access an out-of-bounds array element if it is already known that i is greater than or equal to zero.
Bitwise Boolean Expressions:
The bitwise operators work bit by bit on the operands. The operands must be of integral type. The six bitwise operators are & (AND), | (OR), ^ (exclusive OR, commonly called XOR), ~ (NOT), << (shift left), and >> (shift right). The negation operator is a unary operator which precedes the operand. The others are binary operators which lie between the two operands. The precedence of these operators is lower than that of the relational and equivalence operators; it is often required to parenthesize expressions involving these operators.
Assignment of values:
Programmers should take special care of the fact that the "equal to" operator is ==, not =. This is the cause of numerous coding mistakes and is often a difficult-to-find bug, as the expression (a = b) assigns a a value equal to b and subsequently evaluates to b; but the expression (a == b), called equality operator, checks if a is equal to b. It needs to be noted that, if you confuse = with ==, your mistake will often not be brought to your attention by the compiler. A statement such as if (c = 20) {} is considered perfectly valid by the language, but will always assign 20 to c and evaluate as true. A simple technique to avoid this kind of bug is to put the constant first.
