Why don’t binary operators work when I’m trying to use them as logical operators?

  • operator
  • and
  • boolean
  • logical
  • or

Using the binary and (&) and binary or (|) operators might seem to work for some cases (e.g. for booleans or accidents like 1 & 3), but there are many others where their misuse blows up. The sneakiest bugs happen when people try to combine conditions this way:

x = 1 
if not (x > 0 | x < 2): 
    print('Why are we here?')
# prints "Why are we here?"

The solution is to use the actual logical operators in python, and and or.