Nomenclature Issue

Question

SaurabhSaini OP

Created Jul ’25

Replies 4

Boosts 0

Participants 3

Why Ternary operator in not called a binary Operator or ternary Operands ?

question ? answer1 : answer2 When it takes 2 operators ?

Answered by darkpaw in 847440022

It's basically: if a then b else c which is three parts.

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Answer 1

darkpaw OP

Jul ’25

Recommended

It's basically: if a then b else c which is three parts.

1

Answer 2

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

Jul ’25

And it’s by extension from binary operation, which is the standard term for the + in a + b.

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Answer 3

SaurabhSaini OP

Jul ’25

I believe, Instead of ternary conditional operator it should be ternary conditional operation as three input operands is called ternary operation in mathematics

as

Operator is

Types of operators:
Arithmetic: +, -, *, /
Comparison: ==, !=, >, <
Logical: &&, ||, !
Assignment: =, +=, -=

Operands is [a-z], [A-Z]

It brings confusion from Maths to Programming

in Swift https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-programming-language/basicoperators/#Ternary-Conditional-Operator

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Answer 4

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

Jul ’25

It’s a conditional operator that takes three inputs, so calling it ternary conditional operator doesn’t seem like a big stretch.

Regardless, I’m not the person you need to convince here. If you want to discuss this with Swift language folks, I recommend that you bounce over to Swift Evolution.

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Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
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