Defending the ternary operator

[Andrew Dalke]

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;

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com