this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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How is it unsafe?
Well, if you assume ternary operations work the same in PHP as in c and attempted to write the code demoed by this meme. You would end up with unexpected behavior. Maybe I should have said unexpected behavior instead of unsafe behavior.
PHP is the only language in existence with a left associative ternary operator. Ignoring PHP, the operator has worked exactly the same way for decades. And even PHP has now fixed the operator.
I don't think it's reasonable to avoid a very commonly supported pattern just because a single badly designed language implemented it wrong.
Okay, even if I give you the unexpected behavior point. The readability problem remains. Switch statements or tables will work just fine and are easier to read.
To be clear, I am fine with single ternary operations. I think nested ternary operations are harder to read and follow.
I agree you should use a switch where applicable, but ternaries are the expression equivalent of if-else statements. If I have two conditions and a default, and each branch simply evaluates to a value of the same type, I'll probably just use a ternary.