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Defending the ternary operator

Paul Paterson hamonlypaulpaterson at houston.rr.com
Mon Feb 10 02:35:31 EST 2003 
"Andrew Dalke" <adalke at mindspring.com> wrote in message
news:b27ip8$d7c$1 at slb4.atl.mindspring.net...
> Paul Paterson
> > Continuing the experiment to look at Python code which might use the
> > conditional operator....
> >
> > If my regular expression is correct (and it probably isn't because I'm
not
> > good at them), then a quick scan of my Python22 directory structure
finds
> > 769 matches of the following pattern,
> >
> >     if <something>
> >         variable = <some value>
> >     else:
> >         variable = <some other value>
>
> Oh yeah, and you should also check for
>
>   if <something>:
>     return <some value>
>   return <some other value>
>
> Which is also more common in C code compared to
>
>   return something ? some_value : some_other_value;
>

Wait, I thought that conditional expressions were supposed to reduce the
cognitive overload and now here I am having to think up weird and wonderful
regular expressions to try to evaluate the cognitive benefit... <wink>
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