Ternary Operator

Once upon a time I hinted that there were operators that had more than two operands. This is true, but there is only one case of it in C++. This is a ternary operator, the ternary operator. I have found several different technical explanations of this. Some say it is the ternary operator while others say it is a condition-expression using a ternary operator. They are basically both right, but there is only the one ring, er … ternary operator. J (Sorry, been reading Lord of the Rings).

So what is this damn thing I’m talking about? This particular operation, with the ternary operator, uses the question mark (‘?’). It is basically a compressed ‘if’/’else’ that represents a resulting value. And its practically impossible to explain, let me show you an example:

01	#include <iostream.h>
02
03	main()
04	{
05	int num;
06	cout << “Enter a number (1-10):”;
07	cin >> num;
08	num = (num < 1)?1:num;
09	}

Blargo.