Exclusive disjunction

In logic, exclusive disjunction is a logical operator. The exclusive disjunction of propositions A and B is called A xor B, where "xor" stands for "exclusive or" and is pronounced "ex-or".

The operation yields the result TRUE when one, and only one, of its operands is TRUE.

For two inputs A and B, the truth table of the function is as follows.

A B | A xor B
----+--------
F F |    F
F T |    T
T F |    T
T T |    F

It can be deduced from this table that

(A xor B) = (A and not B) or (not A and B) = (A or B) and (not A or not B) = (A or B) and not (A and B)

The mathematical symbol for exclusive disjunction varies in the literature. In addition to the abbreviation "xor", one may see

• a plus sign ("+") or a plus sign that is modified in some way, such being put inside of a circle ("⊕"); this is used because exclusive disjunction corresponds to addition modulo 2 if F = 0 and T = 1.
• a vee that is modified in some way, such as being underlined ("∨"); this is used because exclusive disjunction is a modification of ordinary (inclusive) disjunction, which is typically denoted by a vee.
• a caret ("^"), as in the C programming language

Binary values xor'ed by themselves are always zero. In some computer architectures, it is faster to store a zero in a register by xor'ing the value with itself instead of loading and storing the value zero. Thus, on some computer architectures, xor'ing values with themselves is a common optimization.

The xor operation is sometimes used as a simple mixing function in cryptography, for example, with one-time pad or Feistel network systems.

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See also: Symmetric difference, or, and, Xor swap algorithm, Xor linked list