I kept my hands off Delphi for too long, I guess; busied myself with Java and PHP a lot over the last couple of years. Now, when I got back to doing a little Delphi job, I realised I really miss the conditional operator which is supported by both Java and PHP.

On how many places would you find lines like these in your Delphi programs?

var s : string;
begin
  ...<here the string result is manipulated>...

  if combo.Text='' then
      s := 'null'
    else
      s := QuotedStr(combo.Text);

  result := result + s;
end;

where a simple

result := result + (combo.text='')?'null':quotedStr(combo.text);

would suffice. What I like about this is that it not only shortens the code, this way I also avoid declaring some helper s:string variable.

Why are conditional operators not part of Delphi and - are they ever going to be supported? I noticed there were quite a few language extensions made for the 2009 version of Delphi (generics), so why not add this feature?

Edit
Report