Now, in this contrived example, it's pretty obvious to see what's going on and what's being assigned where. Consider, however, extending this to a more complex real-world scenario, involving accessing elements in deep data structures, subroutines to format numbers, regular expressions and the like. Clarity, maintainability and even code elegance are quickly lost, all for the sake of a few keystrokes and a newline, unless the person doing the coding is very careful about how he uses the operator.

Very careful? Is it really that hard to see when if/then/else is going to be less clear than the ternary operator (or vice versa)?

Use whichever one's the clearest in a particular situation. Saying that one or the other is less clear or maintainable without a particular context is just silly :-)

In reply to Re: Ternary operators: a hinderance, not a help by adrianh
in thread Ternary operators: a hinderance, not a help by Tanalis

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.