[elgose]

Oh lord, reminds me recently someone at work was trying to get clever with using bit-masks and doing some semi-complicated bitwise operations that were just atrocious. There was a bug (after a couple hours we gave up) but along the way I came across if statements like:

if ((maskA &= maskB) == 0) //<-- accidental assignment of maskA rather than just &'ing
    maskA |= maskB; //<-- obviously, this is just maskA = maskB, not what he intended at all

But who knows, maybe the ultimate problem would have come from realizing the shift operator had a bug?

[jon.kiparsky]

Clearly the world would be a much better place if more people would realize that Java is a language that's designed to discourage cleverness of that type.
You usually don't need to pretend that Java is C, and it usually doesn't work out well when you do.

[turboscrew]

Modulus is an algebraic structure consisting of a set and operations.
What I meant that the operations are such that the result doesn't get out of the set.

Say, set is numbers 0 - 9, then addition is defines such that 9 + 9 doesn't make up 18 that doesn't belong to the set, but it's "wrapped around" so that the result belongs to the set of numbers 0 - 9.

That means that also 1 - 9 doesn't make negative number.

Modulo is good for, say, ring buffer indexing whereas reminder is not - at least if "putback" is supported.