Assuming that $result is 0 or 1

That's a mighty big assumption to make. In this case the ternary operator is far more maintainable. Someone's going to have a *fun* debugging session if the author of the ternary operator has allowed for result being undef,"Bob" or 17.

The ternary operator allows for a consise testing of true/false and returns a value. The power of this of this operator, if properly exploited and understood, is its ability to generate a concise bit of code. What if we have user input and we need to return a value (computed in a subroutine) based upon their input, or a default value if they gave no input (or an input that evaluates as false)?

$result = $input ? somesub($input) : $default;
[download]

Consider the alternative:

if ($input) {
    $result = somesub($input);
} else {
    $result = $default;
}
[download]

I know which I'm putting in my code.

Cheers,
Ovid