There are several boolean operators that come up in SBasic, usually in the arguments to an "if" statement or a while statements. These are best understood by going under the hood a little and seeing how they actually work.

The arguments to a conditional (like "if" or "while") are a boolean expression. That means an expression that resolves to either a one or a zero. Here is a simple expression:

Company = "Hammer Data"

If we put that in an "If" statement, it would appear as:

if(Company = "Hammer Data")
{
  // Do stuff
}
else
{
  // Do other stuff
}
 

The expression portion "resolves". In this case resolving is a little bit like solving an equation in math. The "math" operator in this case is the equal sign. It tells SBasic to compare the value in the variable "Company" with the absolute value of the string "Hammer Data". If it finds that these are the same, it "returns" a one. If they are different, it returns a zero. The "if statement" grabs the value the expression returns and if it is a one it runs the code in the first set of curly braces. If it returns a zero, it runs the code in the "else condition" curly braces (if they exist).

All "truth" expression, comparison expressions, return either a one or a zero. So if we put the value 10 in a variable called "count", we would get:

count = 10 // returns 1
count <> 10 // returns 0
count >= 10 // returns 1
count < 10 // returns 0
etc...
 

The boolean operators (AND, NOT, OR) operate on the one or zero returned by one or more expressions. So, if you have one expression, like "company = "Hammer Data" and it is true (returns a one) and you run that through a NOT operator, the NOT operator will reverse its value and return a zero.

NOT count = 10 // returns 0
 

OR and AND each take two arguments, the results of two expressions. Each of these two results will either be a one or a zero and the result returned by AND or OR will also be a one or a zero.

In the case of AND, both of the expressions must return a one (be true) for AND to return a one. If either of the expressions returns a zero (is untrue), AND will return a zero:

1 AND 1 // returns 1
1 AND 0 // returns 0
0 AND 0 // returns 0
 

In the case of OR, if either expression returns a one (is true), OR will return a one:

1 OR 1 // returns 1
1 OR 0 // returns 1
0 OR 0 // returns 0
 

Expressions can be nested very deeply before they end up returning a one or zero to the conditional statement ("while" or "if") that is resolving the conditional. For that reason it very important to use parenthesis so as to be very clear as to the order of resolution.