Easily solved by using Rust and have literally anything evaluate your expression and return whatever
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2025
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I love ternary for assigning to constants.
Control structure conditional:
- verbose
- boring
- may result to nothing
Ternary expression:
- terse
- all action
- always leads to a result
For real though I actually find them incredibly useful for creating clean and readable code. I wish Lua 5.1 had a ternary syntax.
Ternary, and inline switch (match expressions), as found in functional languages
Oh god yea, replicating switch functionality with a huge column of elifs is so gross.
I've survived 11 years of programming without ternary operators and prefer to keep it that way
luas operators are all text in order to be readable. more symbols makes code less readable.
if you want a one line operation that gives a default result, use or: a = b or c is equivalent to if b then a = b else a = c end.
The issue with Lua's and/or in this context is that they don't work if false or nil are valid values. In a and b or c, if b = false, the result is always c.
I also love null-related operators like ?? and ?. for this, since they explicitly check for null, letting you handle any non-null values for optional/default values. The syntax can get a bit cursed, like maybeNull?.maybeMethod?.(args) in JS, but I still prefer that to writing out multiple field accesses in an if condition... And arguably the code is only less readable if you aren't acclimated to it.
All that said I do really appreciate Lua's simplicity, as a language that provides tooling to create the features you want instead of building them into the language, though I wish it had some conventional regex instead of its own patterns.
i despise doing null checks as operators, because everyone does them differently. python's a is not None is immediately obvious and you don't have to think about chaining rules.
OK true, technically speaking it is indeed more readable, I guess I really meant that it takes far longer to read. I do admire Lua's barebones simplicity. Thank you for the "or" tip, I've used it a few times before but I often forget about it.
always remember that code is read more than it is written. complex lines need to be deciphered, simple lines don't. especially fun with symbols that have nonlocal effects like rusts ?.
Don't you just love the readability
a = a > b ? (b > c ? (a < d ? c : a) : d) : (b < c ? a : d )
Weird example. 3 nested conditionals is not the typical use case for a ternary, and 2 of the 5 branches result in a pointless a=a assignment. I agree this is bad code, but it's just as bad and hard to parss in a normal if-else structure too:
if (a>b) {
if (b>c) {
if (a<d) {
a=c;
}
else {
a=a;
}
}
else {
a=d;
}
}
else {
if (b<c) {
a=a;
}
else {
a=d;
}
}
In another situation, though, it's perfectly readable to have a much more typical ternary use case like:
a = c > d ? c : d
And a pair of parentheses never hurt readability either:
a = (c > d) ? c : d
this is way more nested ternary operators than I would ever use (which I understand is for the sake of example) but if you rearrange them so that the simplest statements are in the true branches, and use indentation, you can make it at least a little more readable
a = a <= b ?
(b < c ? a : d)
: b <= c ?
d
: (a < d ? c : a);
Bah
Ternary is just a compressed if-elseif-else chain with a guaranteed assignment.
If you format it like a sane person, or like you would an if/else chain, then it's way easier to read than if/else chains.
if else chain? believe of or not, straight to jail.
Hey, when you gotta pick a value from a bunch of options, it's either if/elseif/else, ternary, switch/case, or a map/dict.
Ternary generally has the easiest to read format of the options, unless you put it all on one line like a crazy person.
me personally, i prefer switch case statements for many-value selection, but if ternary works for you, go ham (as long as you don't happen to be the guy who's code I keep having to scrub lol)
Switch is good if you only need to compare equals when selecting a value.
Although some languages make it way more powerful, like python match.
but I generally dislike python despite of this, and I generally dislike switch because the syntax and formatting is just too unlike the rest of the languages.
Generally I prefer the clear brevity of:
var foo=
x>100 ? bar :
x>50 ? baz :
x>10 ? qux :
quux;
Over
var foo;
if(x>100) {
foo=bar;
} else if(x>50) {
foo=baz;
} else if(x>10) {
foo=qux;
} else {
foo=quux;
}
Which doesn't really get any better if you remove the optional (but recommended) braces.
Heck, I even prefer ternary over some variations of switch for equals conditionals, like the one in Java:
var foo;
switch(x) {
case 100:
foo=bar;
break;
case 50:
foo=baz;
break;
case 10:
foo=qux;
break;
default:
foo=quux;
}
But some languages do switch better than others (like python as previously mentioned), so there are certainly cases where that'd probably be preferable even to me.
If there's more than two branches in the decision tree I'll default to a if/else or switch/case except if I want to initialise a const to a conditional value, which is one of the places I praise the lord for ternaries.
At my previous workplace we had a C macro that was something like
#define CheckWhatever(x__, true__, false__) \
whatever(x) ? (true__) : (false__)
I don't remember this shit, so I'm just paraphrasing cursed C. The question one would ask is... why? Well, because you also want to do
#define CheckWhatever2(x__, true__, false__) \
CheckWhatever((x__ ##1), (true__), (false__)) \
CheckWhatever((x__ ##2), (true__), (false__))
And, of course
#define CheckWhatever3(x__, true__, false__) \
CheckWhatever2((x__ ##1), (true__), (false__)) \
CheckWhatever2((x__ ##2), (true__), (false__))
Long story short, someone wanted to CheckWhatever6 inside another macro. While debugging code old enough to vote, my editor suggested expanding the macro, which expanded to ~1400 lines for a single ternary operator chain. Fun times!
yeah... yikes. c is a beautiful language but thing like these are why macros may be it's largest blemish. hope that codebase doesn't keep planes flying!
I have bad news for you
For all its faults, I think what makes C beautiful is that it gives you complete freedom do be an absolute idiot.
Whenever I decide to hack something together with an arcane macro, I feel like an animal being released back into the wild, with the (pre-)compiler yelling "Be free! Explore the mysteries of our incomprehensible world!"
x = if y > 5 { "foo" } else { "bar" }
This is just superior to anything else
In what language is that valid syntax?
This is Rust syntax, but there's similar syntax in Haskell
This is valid rust. I don't know if there are more languages with this feature
I honestly can't see how this is more readable than
x = (y > 5) ? "foo" : "bar"
I get that it's a syntax that needs to be learned, but it's just so clean and concise!
Because it can be done for multiple lines too. And you can do else-if too. Also, "if" and "else" is more recognizable than "?" and ":"
x = if y > 5 {
println!("Y was over 5");
z + 5
} else if y < 0 {
handle_negative_y(y);
z - y
} else {
println!("<WARN> unexpected value for y"}
0
}
What I like about using if and else for that is that you're already using those keywords for branching in other parts of the code.
Though my least favorite is probably Python's:
x = "foo" if y > 5 else "bar"
It just seems backwards to me
Because Python wants you to read it like English:
x is "foo" if y is greater than 5, else it is "bar"
While Python's version does feel a bit backwards, it's at least consistent with how list comprehensions are set up. They can also feel a bit "backwards" imo, especially when they include conditionals.
List comprehension is another thing I don't like about Python :)
There's more of those, but one thing I do like about Python is that I get paid for writing it, so I try not to complain too much
I love list comprehension. Best part of the language, imo. To each their own.
Never forget your roots
(setq x (if (> y 5) :foo :bar))
('bar',:'foo')&({~ 5&< )
All my homies love ternary
you would love jsx/tsx with react
"Brought to you by the Go gang"
lua -e "print('Lua: ' .. ('awkward_look_monkey_meme' and '👀' or '😐'))"
python -c "print('Python: ' + (not 'awkward_look_monkey_meme' and '👀' or '😐'))"
A lot of languages have more intuitive ternary syntax than C