Re^2: Conditional Operator Confusion

[Melly]

Hey! The camel book told me it was just like an if-else (well, sort of). Hmm, I must admit that I'm still slightly in the dark here - none of the examples given so far help me understand exactly what is going on...

[Herkum]

The trinary is much like any other operator, for example ==. Lets try this example,

my $result = $a == $b

Here, you get the result of the == operator, is $a equal $b. If they match it returns true, if they don't match it returns false.

The trinary works in a similar manner except you are setting the value returned instead of the implied value of other operators.

my $result = $a == $b ? 1 : 0;

This does the same thing as the first example, except you are explicitly setting the value returned. Does this help?

[Melly]

Not really... I'm sure I'm being really dumb here, but I still don't understand, in the following example, why $x gets set to "FALSE"... just very, very confused...

1==1?$x='TRUE':$y='FALSE';
print "x=$x\n";

[ikegami]

The conditional operator has higher precedence than the assignment operator, so
$c?$x='TRUE':$y='FALSE'
is the same as
($c?$x='TRUE':$y)='FALSE'

The addition operator has higher precedence than the conditional operator, so
$c?$x+2:$y+3
is the same as
$c?$x+2:($y+3)

If you want to do assignments, use if or add parens. Think of as the conditional operator as an operator that returns something.