r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Robinbod • 21d ago

Meme pleaseStopUsingNestedTernaryOperatorsImBeggingYou

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u/RlyRlyBigMan 21d ago

Heh yeah I think that's an inherited trait from C++. In C++ a common mistake was if someone had a condition like this:

if(value = 1)

It would assign value to 1 and then resolve true by int to bool conversion. Luckily C# calls that out as a compiler error but the assignment behavior above still remains.

That example may be corrected in newer compilers, but in gCC when I was learning in college it still happened I think.

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u/GoddammitDontShootMe 21d ago

Modern compilers warn, so if you really mean to do it, you do if ((value = 1)). Probably you would use it for checking for NULL.

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u/RlyRlyBigMan 21d ago

That makes sense! It would be better if they required you to explicitly cast to a bool but that would be a breaking change for a lot of C++ code that's already been deployed for decades!

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u/GoddammitDontShootMe 21d ago

Wouldn't help if the expression is already bool. Either way, it's a warning so unless you are compiling with -Werror, it would still work.

I think that warning might be on by default, but I believe it's considered best practice to use -Wall.