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Ternary If

2:53 with Jeremy McLain

This bit of syntactic sugar can reduce simple if / else conditionals to a single line.

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    Let's take a second look at the if else statement we wrote in the previous video. 0:00
    This is a very basic if else statement that 0:04
    we can actually turn into a single line using the ternary if operator. 0:07
    The ternary if operator is a bit of syntactic sugar 0:11
    that can greatly simplify if else blocks like this. 0:15
    I'll show you how it's used here. 0:19
    The way we use this is to replace the if and else along with their curly braces 0:21
    with the question mark and colon characters like so. 0:26
    This is doing exactly the same thing that the previous code did. 0:46
    This will return a map location if path step is less than 0:50
    path.length otherwise it will return null. 0:55
    The return keyword is not part of the ternary if. 1:00
    We could have assigned the result of this expression to a variable instead. 1:03
    Returning two different values based on a condition, 1:10
    is a very common coding pattern. 1:13
    It's a good place to use the ternary if operator. 1:15
    In fact, you might see lots of places you could use the ternary if operator 1:19
    instead of using if else. 1:23
    You need to use your judgment though. 1:25
    Sometimes using this syntactic sugar in places where it isn't obvious 1:27
    why you're using it, can make code more difficult to understand. 1:32
    So only use it in cases where it's very obvious why it's happening. 1:36
    Part of the reason I'm showing it here is so 1:41
    that you can recognize it when you see it in code you might read in the future. 1:44
    Another good tip for using it is to use parenthesis. 1:49
    We don't actually need to use parentheses here, but 1:53
    i think it makes it more obvious what the condition is. 1:56
    You could also put parenthesis around these other operands to clarify 2:00
    the two different results. 2:04
    Let's compile this just to make sure we haven't broken anything. 2:08
    So going to the console ncs 2:11
    -out:Treehouse *.cs. 2:14
    Looks like we do have a compiler error. 2:22
    It says class struct or interface method must have a return type. 2:24
    Let's see here. 2:28
    Path.cs, line 12. 2:29
    Looks like I forgot to say that we want to return a MapLocation here. 2:35
    Let's try this again. 2:43
    There we go, it all works. 2:46
    It's a good thing we have a compiler to help us out? 2:49

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