in reply to Re: No braces
in thread No braces

I like the ternary also instead of using braces. Less noise.

But to help me make sense of the statement when I (or someone else) look at it later on, I use multiple lines as in:

$x =
    $x == 7
        ? 8
        : 0;

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Thus, if you don't speak fluent "precedence", this structure does all the work. (Even bordering on "it's right when it's beautiful"?)

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Re: Re: Re: No braces
by flyingmoose (Priest) on Feb 11, 2004 at 13:56 UTC
    The greatest fear of that operator comes from chaining. It's deceptively cool looking to use, so occasionally folks will do something like this (C, Java, Perl, it doesn't matter....) 
    $x = (y == z) 
     ?  (a == c)  ? foo (a,c)
                  : bar (y,c)
     :  (a == b)  ? baz (a,y)
                  : zap (y,y);

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    Identation helps, but there are still cases when a nested if-comb can be more readable.

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      A big problem is that Perl doesn't have a proper switch statement, which means a chained ? : is used far more often that it otherwise would.

      ----
      : () { :|:& };:

      Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

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        Point taken. Looking over CPAN right now, it appears Damian wrote a Switch module. I really wish something like this was in the core distribution. Well, I guess we can wait a few years for Perl 6! Anyone have experience with this?

        See below. I have done something like this before and didn't like it much, but it got the job done. Really though, it's not any cleaner than the if-comb due to the extra semantic gorp. 

            foo: {
        if (/^abc/) { $abc = 1; last foo; }
        if (/^def/) { $def = 1; last foo; }
        if (/^xyz/) { $xyz = 1; last foo; }
        $nothing = 1;
    }

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