Benefits of using the conditional ?: (ternary) operator

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What are the benefits and drawbacks of the ?: operator as opposed to the standard if/else statement? The obvious ones being:

Conditional ?: Operator

Pro: Shorter and more concise when dealing with direct value comparisons and assignments.
Con: Doesn't seem to be as flexible as the if/else construct.

Standard If/Else

Pro: Can be applied to more situations (such as function calls).
Con: Often unnecessarily long.

Readability seems to vary for each depending on the statement. For a little while after first being exposed to the ?: operator, it took me some time to digest exactly how it worked. Would you recommend using it wherever possible, or sticking to if/else given that I work with many non-programmers?

c# conditional-operator

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The conditional operator is great for short conditions, like this:

varA = boolB ? valC : valD;

I use it occasionally because it takes less time to write something that way... unfortunately, this branching can sometimes be missed by another developer browsing over your code. Plus, code isn't usually that short, so I usually help readability by putting the ? and : on separate lines, like this:

doSomeStuffToSomething(shouldSomethingBeDone()
    ? getTheThingThatNeedsStuffDone()
    : getTheOtherThingThatNeedsStuffDone());

However, the big advantage to using if/else blocks (and why I prefer them) is that it's easier to come in later and add some additional logic to the branch,

if (shouldSomethingBeDone()) {
    doSomeStuffToSomething(getTheThingThatNeedsStuffDone());
    doSomeAdditionalStuff();
} else {
doSomeStuffToSomething(getTheOtherThingThatNeedsStuffDone());
}

or add another condition:

if (shouldSomethingBeDone()) {
    doSomeStuffToSomething(getTheThingThatNeedsStuffDone());
    doSomeAdditionalStuff();
} else if (shouldThisOtherThingBeDone()){
    doSomeStuffToSomething(getTheOtherThingThatNeedsStuffDone());
}

So, in the end, it's about convenience for you now (shorter to use :?) vs. convenience for you (and others) later. It's a judgment call... but like all other code-formatting issues, the only real rule is to be consistent, and be visually courteous to those who have to maintain (or grade!) your code.

(all code eye-compiled)

answered 2010-07-22T20:10:26.167

Benefits of using the conditional ?: (ternary) operator

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