Comment by mjcohen

17 hours ago

The ternary operator is easy to nest if you put each clause on a separate line. Then it looks just like nested if-then-else.

7 comments

mjcohen

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edoceo  17 hours ago

I love the ternary operator as much as anyone. But dang if it doesn't get hard to read when there is are a few, nested even.

Does that operator compile to faster assembly that if I make the same logic with verbose `if` logic? Is that a language specific outcome?

  • gnubison  16 hours ago 

        cond1 ? res1 :
    cond2 ? res2 :
    cond3 ? res3 :
    or_else_res

    If they are truly nested, then that is confusing. But if you have an if-else chain, then it can be quite readable.

    • froh  6 hours ago

      or

        if cond1 then res1
  else if cond2 then res2
  else if cond3 then res3
  else or_else_res

      or

        if cond1 then res1
  elif cond2 then res2
  elif cond3 then res3
  else or_else_res

      what is most lua-like?

    • shevy-java  16 hours ago

      I find that so much harder to read compared to if/else or case/when in ruby.

      The ? is basically an attempt to use fewer if/else, at the cost of condensed if-else like structure. I always need to look at both parts after the ? whereas in a single if or elsif I don't. case/when in ruby is even better here e. g. regex check:

         def foo(i)
     case i
     when /^cat/
       handle_cats
     when /^dog/
       handle_dogs

      (I ommitted the "end"s here to just focus on the conditional logic.)