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Comment by wlievens | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely.

I once had to deal with code that did something like this:

  return a ? b : c ? d : e ? f : g;

I'm not kidding.

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Which is actually pretty useful and readable, imho (if formatted correctly):

  return a ? b :
         c ? d :
         e ? f :
         g;

Side note: this does not work in PHP, as the operator is left-associative instead of right-associative there. The above in PHP would be evaluated as:

  return ((a ? b : c) ? d : e) ? f : g;

Which is almost never what you want. I can't even format this properly to convey intent.

The only sane thing is to use if statements, imho. No ninja cowboy engineer nonsense.

Sometimes, if-statements unnecessarily add lines, and the lines become harder to read.

I would say it's a case-by-case statement. Well, okay, more specifically, I would say that the use of a single ternary if is a case-by-case statement.

Absolutely. I use ternary if when appropriate. But nesting ternary ifs is horrible, and nesting ternary ifs while discarding parentheses is malevolent.

Correct bracketing would be plenty in this case. If-statements sometimes (not always) make code much less readable than ternary operations.

This is why more languages should adopt the every-form-returns-a-value paradigm.

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