Ternary operator

[dalewking]

@roryaburks

I, for one, emphatically throw my hat into the ring in favor of the standard C-style ternary operator.

I, for one, emphatically throw my hat into the ring AGAINST the standard C-style ternary operator

@roryaburks

While I’m not averse to shaving away questionably or unnecessary functionality that does not make sense in the new language (such as old for-style loops), this is just change for the sake of change.

And this is definitely unnecessary functionality with if-else expressions.

@roryaburks

It’s no less ugly than the traditional method, it’s bulkier making it harder to cleanly fit on a single line

The phrase you are looking for is “easier to read”.

@roryaburks

but also lopsided in a way that doesn’t lend well to splitting up over multiple lines

ternary operator is the most lopsided operator there is because it is a postfix on the condition. Imagine reading from right to left, x = a, ok a gets assigned to x, now ?, WTF? x = a ? b, WTF?, x = a ? b :, Huh?. Compare that to x = if, OK at this point I know x is getting assigned the result of a conditional.

@roryaburks

Someone who doesn’t know what a ternary operator is will see “x = a ? b : c” and think “I don’t know what this is, I should look it up.”

The phrase you are looking for there is “hard to read” or “unobvious”. And they will likely have to repeatedly look it up.

@roryaburks

They see x = if( a) b else c they might say the same thing or they might say “What is this, some sort of predicate? Is x a value or a command path? I know what an if-else block is, is this a standard if else block? What does assigning that even do?

They see that and they already know what an if-else is. Only difference is that it has a value instead of continuing the artificial Java and C limitation that if has no value. Lots of other languages already have if-expressions and this is easy for them to read. I think a non-programmer could figure out what x = if(a) b else c means.

@roryaburks

Frankly, if you don’t have the balls to remove the ternary operator entirely, don’t give it some confusing coat of paint to make it “more obvious.”

Certainly no one is talking about removing conditional expressions. Ternary operator exists ONLY because in C if was a statement not an expression. With that limitation gone ternary operator has no reason to exist.