What does the & operator do as part of a condition?

Question

for(int a = 0; a<10; a++){
if(a&1) {
cout << a;
}
}

// outputs 13579

What does the & operator do as part of the 'if' statement's condition?

Answer 1

Solus it's *bitwise AND* operator that is being used inside the *if* statement.

Bitwise AND operator takes binary representation of the 2 operands and perform bitwise AND of them.

In this perticular case, you are checking wether any number's first bit is 0 or not.

It is just another(faster) way to check whether an number is even or odd.

you can learn more about bitwise operators here👇
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/bitwise-operators-in-c-cpp/

Edit : thanks ~ swim ~ for correcting the error.