Agree with Mark and Dimitre. Too much thinking required to figure out what the hell is going on in nested ternary statements. You’re trying to be too clever for your own good, and I guarantee you something will go wrong with your code down the line. And probably not because you broke it. But because someone else didn’t understand what your statement is doing. Computers are fast. Don’t worry about optimizing a few lines of code for the computer – optimize for the human reading it.

Generally I’d say you really missed the whole point of Mark’s post. It’s not about making the computer do the right thing. That’s easy. The hard part is helping humans understand what is happening. Nested ternary statements fail the latter. ALWAYS.

In fact, to add to Mark’s general rule of thumb – I will just go ahead and say never nest statements more than one level deep. You’ve done something wrong if you need that level of complexity. Break it down. Simplify it – and write for the junior level coder that will be maintaining your code after you are long gone sipping margaritas on the beach.

breaks the other rule: “Don’t make me think”…. i.e. if you think what it means you’ll get it, but you won’t get it without thinking.

Look here if you want to see the formatting I’m talking about:

http://darose.net/NestedTernaryFormatting.html

Disagree. Ternary statements get a bad rap, and IMO the reason is because people don’t format them properly. When you write them like this, they’ actually quite readable.

String successStr =
step1Succeeded
? “success”
: step2Succeeded
? “success”
: “fail”;

or

String successStr = step1Succeeded ? “success” :
step2Succeeded ? “success” :
“fail”;