Logical expressions

There are three logical operators in Java that can be applied to boolean expressions:

AND has higher priority than OR, so that

a || b && c ≡ a || ( b && c )

but again, it is always better to use parentheses to explicitly define the order of operations.

The logical operations in Java exhibit so-called short-circuiting behavior, which means that the second operand is evaluated only if needed.

This feature is very useful when a part of an expression cannot be evaluated (will cause error) if another part is not true. For example, let destinations be a collection of places an agent in the model must visit. To test if the first place to visit is London, you can write:

Short-circuiting behavior of logical operations

Here we first test if the list of destinations exists at all (does not equal null), then, if it exists, we test if it has at least one element (its size is greater than 0), and if yes, we compare that element with the string "London".

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