Benefits of using the conditional ?: (ternary) operator

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What are the benefits and drawbacks of the ?: operator as opposed to the standard if-else statement. The obvious ones being:

Conditional ?: Operator

  • Shorter and more concise when dealing with direct value comparisons and assignments
  • Doesn't seem to be as flexible as the if/else construct

Standard If/Else

  • Can be applied to more situations (such as function calls)
  • Often are unnecessarily long

Readability seems to vary for each depending on the statement. For a little while after first being exposed to the ?: operator, it took me some time to digest exactly how it worked. Would you recommend using it wherever possible, or sticking to if/else given that I work with many non-programmers?

conditional-operator c#
17 Answers

With C# 7, you can use the new ref locals feature to simplify the conditional assignment of ref-compatible variables. So now, not only can you do:

int i = 0;

T b = default(T), c = default(T);

// initialization of C#7 'ref-local' variable using a conditional r-value⁽¹⁾

ref T a = ref (i == 0 ? ref b : ref c);

...but also the extremely wonderful:

// assignment of l-value⁽²⁾ conditioned by C#7 'ref-locals'

(i == 0 ? ref b : ref c) = a;

That line of code assigns the value of a to either b or c, depending on the value of i.


Notes
1. r-value is the right-hand side of an assignment, the value that gets assigned.
2. l-value is the left-hand side of an assignment, the variable that receives the assigned value.

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