# The ternary operator

In this module, we will look at the “ternary operator”, a very efficient shortcut to perform a logical test in a single line. This is a construct we will use quite a lot to express a conditional expression in a single line.

Based on what we have seen in the previous modules, the way to store different values in a variable according to some condition we set would be to write something like:

x::Float64 = 0.0
if rand() < 0.5
x = 0.25
else
x = 0.75
end

0.25


In the words of Stephen King, “it goes somewhere, but it ain’t, you know, boss”. Thankfully there is a way to simplify this expression greatly, and it does of course involve learning some more operators.

x = rand() < 0.5 ? 0.25 : 0.75

0.75


This is called a ternary operator. The basic syntax is condition ? if true : if false. It fits in a single line, and we can handle both cases. Note that the cases are returned as a function of whether the condition is satisfied, which is a way to rapidly fill a variable.

Another source of efficiency is that both sides of the : are not evaluated, unlike other languages:

true ? print(2) : print(3)

2


We can check this using the @lower macro from Meta: it is translating Julia code into something of a lower-level, and is an interesting opportunity to check what is going on “under the hood”:

Meta.@lower true ? cos(4) : sin(3)

:($(Expr(:thunk, CodeInfo( @ none within top-level scope 1 ─ goto #3 if not true 2 ─ %2 = cos(4) └── return %2 3 ─ %4 = sin(3) └── return %4 ))))  We see in the output above that the operations (like cos(4)) have not been expanded yet – the ternary operator is “pointing” Julia towards the right branch. We can use the ternary operator as the most basic ingredient in a very naive function that reproduces the Kronecker$\delta$function: it returns 1 if the two inputs are equal, and 0 if they are not. This function is generally applied to non-negative integers. Of course, if we wanted to do this properly, we could remember that false is 0 and true is 1, and our function is not necessary. Nevertheless, this is an interesting example to write from scratch: function δ(i::T, j::T) where {T <: Integer} return i == j ? one(T) : zero(T) end  δ (generic function with 1 method)  We can see what our function would do when applied to actual numbers: for i in 1:3, j in 1:3 @info "δ($(i), $(j)) =$(δ(i, j))"
end

[ Info: δ(1, 1) = 1
[ Info: δ(1, 2) = 0
[ Info: δ(1, 3) = 0
[ Info: δ(2, 1) = 0
[ Info: δ(2, 2) = 1
[ Info: δ(2, 3) = 0
[ Info: δ(3, 1) = 0
[ Info: δ(3, 2) = 0
[ Info: δ(3, 3) = 1