http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=1079937


in reply to conditional statements in list constructors

G'day Don Coyote,

if may be used as a Compound Statement or as a Statement Modifier. It is not an operator.

Placing an if statement in a do block, as you show, can emulate the ternary operator but, as is fairly obvious, results in clunky code with poor readability and maintainability.

So, if introduces a compound statement (or statement modifier) and ?: is an operator. They are not synonymous. With do blocks, parentheses, and other syntactical tricks, you can usually (if not always) replace one with the other; however, this is typically not a good idea. [For more on this, see "Re: Code blocks with ternary operator or trailing conditionals", which I wrote a few weeks ago.]

The ternary operator can be used in any list, not just to generate an array, so an improvement on the print examples you show, might be (using equivalent code):

print 1<2 ? '1' : '2', $/;

Although, perhaps a more likely scenario might be something like:

$ perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -e ' for my $item_count (0..2) { print "$item_count item", $item_count == 1 ? "" : "s", ".\n" } ' 0 items. 1 item. 2 items.

When using the ternary operator, take care with precedence issues and add parentheses where needed (the documentation shows some examples).

A final point, unrelated to conditionals, regarding your test:

my $arrref = \( if(1<2){'1'}else{()} );

Taking a reference to a list actually returns a list of references to each item in the original list. Accordingly, it would probably be a good idea to avoid any instances of:

$arrayref = \(...);

While that may work when first written using a list with only one item, any subsequent modifications which result in additional list items will cause problems. A better option would be:

$arrayref = [...];

Item 2. of "perlref: Making References" has more information on this.

-- Ken