[Insight-developers] The Evil Ternary operator.

[Dženan Zukić]

Well, this looks like a worthy exception. But I also hate operator ?: nested
in other code.

Dženan

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 17:43, Frank Miller <frankmiller at jhmi.edu> wrote:

> I feel compelled to express some support for the ternary operator.
> Consider the following
>
>  const int step = stepBackward ? -1 : 1;
>
> The "three lines of code and four brackets" equivalent would be
>
>  int step = 1;
>  if ( stepBackward )
>    step = -1;
>
> It is not possible to make step const this way. Because of this I would
> argue that the former is easier to maintain because the reader knows
> that the value of step will never change. The less context the reader
> has to remember the easier the code will be to understand.
>
> Just wanted to throw that out there.
>
> Frank
>
> On Sun, 2010-08-29 at 11:10 -0400, David Cole wrote:
> > On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 4:27 PM, Luis Ibanez <luis.ibanez at kitware.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> >                 As for the style of a trinary operator vs seven lines
> >                 of code, I just found seven to be too many.
> >
> >
> >
> >         ---------
> >
> >         Well,
> >         they are three lines of code and four brackets.      :-)
> >
> >         The real difference comes when you run this in a debugger,
> >         and when a new reader of the code has to come and figure
> >         out what the code is doing.
> >
> >         Human readers will mentally translate that ternary operator
> >         into an "if", and it will simply increase the cost of
> >         maintenance
> >         of the code (most of the time of debugging code is spent
> >         reading code, trying to figure out what it was supposed to
> >         do).
> >
> >
> >         It is a lot better to have three lines of code and four
> >         brackets
> >         than having a single line of code with a ternary operator that
> >         is not easily debuggable nor maintainable.
> >
> >
> >         At the end,
> >         the code is intended for human readers.
> >
> >
> >             Luis
> >
> >
> >
> >
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> >
> >
> >
> > Definitely. This issue is most definitely *NOT* a style issue. It is
> > absolutely a code maintainability issue. Always use if/else and
> > multiple lines in a source file for ease of debugging.
> >
> >
> > David
> >
> >
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>
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