• deaf_fish@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Well, if you assume ternary operations work the same in PHP as in c and attempted to write the code demoed by this meme. You would end up with unexpected behavior. Maybe I should have said unexpected behavior instead of unsafe behavior.

    • Serdan@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      PHP is the only language in existence with a left associative ternary operator. Ignoring PHP, the operator has worked exactly the same way for decades. And even PHP has now fixed the operator.

      I don’t think it’s reasonable to avoid a very commonly supported pattern just because a single badly designed language implemented it wrong.

      • deaf_fish@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Okay, even if I give you the unexpected behavior point. The readability problem remains. Switch statements or tables will work just fine and are easier to read.

        To be clear, I am fine with single ternary operations. I think nested ternary operations are harder to read and follow.

        • Serdan@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          I agree you should use a switch where applicable, but ternaries are the expression equivalent of if-else statements. If I have two conditions and a default, and each branch simply evaluates to a value of the same type, I’ll probably just use a ternary.