Ternary Operator

Ternary operator

The ternary operator is also known as the conditional operator and ternary if. It first appeared in the programming language ALGOL. The operator turned out to be convenient and many programmers liked it. The languages of the next generation, BCPL and C, inherited the ternary if. It later came to almost all modern languages, including C++, C#, Java, Python, PHP, and more. A ternary operator is a compact form of the if statement.

For example, let’s suppose that our script has the following if statement:

if ((var < 10))
then
  ((result = 0))
else
  ((result = var))
fi

Here, the result variable is assigned the zero value if var is less than 10. Otherwise, result gets the value of var.

We can get the same behavior using the ternary operator. It looks like this:

((result = var < 10 ? 0 : var))

Run the commands discussed in this lesson in the terminal below.