[java] What does "|=" mean? (pipe equal operator)

I was looking for an answer on what |= does in Groovy and although answers above are right on they did not help me understand a particular piece of code I was looking at.

In particular, when applied to a boolean variable "|=" will set it to TRUE the first time it encounters a truthy expression on the right side and will HOLD its TRUE value for all |= subsequent calls. Like a latch.

Here a simplified example of this:

groovy> boolean result  
groovy> //------------ 
groovy> println result           //<-- False by default
groovy> println result |= false 
groovy> println result |= true   //<-- set to True and latched on to it
groovy> println result |= false 

Output:

false
false
true
true

Edit: Why is this useful?

Consider a situation where you want to know if anything has changed on a variety of objects and if so notify some one of the changes. So, you would setup a hasChanges boolean and set it to |= diff (a,b) and then |= dif(b,c) etc. Here is a brief example:

groovy> boolean hasChanges, a, b, c, d 
groovy> diff = {x,y -> x!=y}  
groovy> hasChanges |= diff(a,b) 
groovy> hasChanges |= diff(b,c) 
groovy> hasChanges |= diff(true,false) 
groovy> hasChanges |= diff(c,d) 
groovy> hasChanges 

Result: true

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