Question

Is it a good idea to have nested ternary operators in code? Warning: old style C code: BzCmp BzCompare (y, z)

BigZ y, z;

/*
* Returns BZ_GT if Y > Z,
* BZ_LT if Y < Z,
* BZ_EQ otherwise.
*/

{
return (BzGetSign (y) > BzGetSign (z) ? BZ_GT :
BzGetSign (y) < BzGetSign (z) ? BZ_LT :
BzGetSign (y) > 0 ? BnnCompare (BzToBn (y), BzGetSize (y),
BzToBn (z), BzGetSize (z)) :
BzGetSign (y) < 0 ? BnnCompare (BzToBn (z), BzGetSize (z),
BzToBn (y), BzGetSize (y)) :
BZ_EQ);
}

Answer 1

Bz and bigZ just mean biginteger... it's that thing I needed help with yesterday: implement a bigint class

Answer 2

Please make this an if/else if/else tree. Nested ternaries are hard to read. I try to avoid ternary operators completely, unless it's a ridiculously simple case (and then only in *some* cases). I probably wouldn't even use it to implement signum(x).

Maybe in a C macro, where the macro is so well-defined and perfectly working that no one would ever have to look at its implementation.

Answer 3

but they seem useful for writing return one-liners, like the above code to compare two bigints.

Answer 4

Yes, they are useful for writing code. But they are not useful for reading code. Write code to be read.

Answer 5

this is gud habit of writing the program...... LOC's are reduced using this programming and efficiecy will be increased

Answer 6

I believe readabilty and understandability takes precedence over LOCs.

If a single line of code can more effectively represent a procedure than 100 lines of code (compare hundreds of C lines to perhaps 3 SQL or python lines), then I'd go with that.

However, if someone writes an OS or even a simple strcpy procedure in a few lines, it will usually be difficult to understand by others, unless the author spreads out the procedure into multiple lines, uses effective names in his code, effective comments, etc.