An important Boolean function is the bitwise exclusive or function :

a	b	a b
0	0	0
0	1	1
1	0	1
1	1	0

Sometimes called a half-adder or XOR, is true if a or b is true, but not both. The Java operator for is ^.

An important fact is that (a b) b = a.

Exclusive OR has many important uses:

• Cryptography: text code looks like garbage, but another code recovers the text.

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