Non short-circuiting can be useful. Sometimes you want to make sure that two expressions evaluate. For example, say you have a method that removes an object from two separate lists. You might want to do something like this:
class foo {
ArrayList<Bar> list1 = new ArrayList<Bar>();
ArrayList<Bar> list2 = new ArrayList<Bar>();
//Returns true if bar is removed from both lists, otherwise false.
boolean removeBar(Bar bar) {
return (list1.remove(bar) & list2.remove(bar));
}
}
If your method instead used the conditional operand, it would fail to remove the object from the second list if the first list returned false.
//Fails to execute the second remove if the first returns false.
boolean removeBar(Bar bar) {
return (list1.remove(bar) && list2.remove(bar));
}
It's not amazingly useful, and (as with most programming tasks) you could achieve it with other means. But it is a use case for bitwise operands.