Ternary conditional operator: Difference between revisions

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Revision as of 11:31, 21 February 2008

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{{Unreferenced|date=November 2007}}

'''<code>?:</code>''' is a [[ternary operator]] that is part of the syntax for a basic [[conditional statement|conditional expression]] in several [[programming language]]s including [[C (programming language)|C]], [[Objective-C]], [[C++]], [[C Sharp (programming language)|C#]], [[D programming language|D]], [[Java (programming language)|Java]], [[JavaScript]], [[Linoleum programming language|Linoleum]], [[Perl]], [[PHP]], [[Tcl]], [[Ruby programming language|Ruby]], and [[Verilog]]. Its origin comes from [[BCPL]], whose equivalent syntax for E1&nbsp;?&nbsp;E2&nbsp;:E3 was E1&nbsp;->&nbsp;E2,&nbsp;E3. Languages derived from BCPL tend to feature this operator.

==Conditional assignment==

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</source>

This is much more readable and is more immediately recognized than the <code>if</code> statement equivalent.

== Inconsistency of Implementations ==

Due to an unfortunate error in the language grammar, the implementation of ?: in the PHP language uses the incorrect associativity when compared to other languages, and given a value of '''T''' for '''arg''', the PHP equivalent of the above example would yield the value '''horse''' instead of '''train''' as one would expect.

== Conditional jumps ==