this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025
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[โ€“] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 7 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Boiling down multi-line expressions into single line statements has been a trend in Comp-Sci for a while.

That

X = IsY ? Y : Z

format has been around for decades.

I generally prefer it to clunky if-statements

[โ€“] Ephera@lemmy.ml 5 points 6 days ago

I prefer if-expressions where possible. For example, this is valid Rust:

let x = if is_y {
    y
} else {
    z
};

(Can also be on a single line.)

This is the same syntax as the normal if-statement, except the compiler forces you to add an else-branch, if you want to 'return' a value from it.

Don't tell anyone, but the ternary operator is when the C designers realized that being purely procedural is cumbersome AF. ๐Ÿ™ƒ
Unfortunately, they decided that expressions need to look like math, so now JS devs get to write random question marks and colons across many, deeply nested lines of code.