I agree! I don’t think 3?”stuff”:”empty” should work at all because I think it’s an insane way to type a ternary :) I’m also very open to admitting that it’s just my own strongly worded opinion.
I think that in most cases, syntactically significant whitespace is a horrible idea - the one exception being that you should have space between operators/identifiers/etc. I don’t care how much, and 4 spaces should have no more special meaning than 1, but I do think that using a space to indicate “this thing is a different thing than the thing before it” is important.
3?"bar":"qux" only has the ternary expression as a valid parsing of ?
foo?"bar":"qux" fails because foo may be a method and foo? is also a valid method identifier.
foo ?"bar":"qux" fails because ?" uses the ? unary operator that makes the next character a string. So ?"bar" becomes the string " followed by what looks to be an identifier.
And so…
? character is a valid part of an identifier (but only at the end of a method name)
?x unary operator to create a String from a character
Personally, I think that if you’d rather write
foo?a:bthanfoo ? a : b, you’re probably insaneBut why would
3?"stuff":"empty"work andfoo?"stuff":"empty"not work?Syntactically significant whitespace is a nightmare to deal with.
I agree! I don’t think
3?”stuff”:”empty”should work at all because I think it’s an insane way to type a ternary :) I’m also very open to admitting that it’s just my own strongly worded opinion.I think that in most cases, syntactically significant whitespace is a horrible idea - the one exception being that you should have space between operators/identifiers/etc. I don’t care how much, and 4 spaces should have no more special meaning than 1, but I do think that using a space to indicate “this thing is a different thing than the thing before it” is important.
Talking with a rubyist:
3?"bar":"qux"only has the ternary expression as a valid parsing of?foo?"bar":"qux"fails becausefoomay be a method andfoo?is also a valid method identifier.foo ?"bar":"qux"fails because?"uses the?unary operator that makes the next character a string. So?"bar"becomes the string"followed by what looks to be an identifier.And so…
?character is a valid part of an identifier (but only at the end of a method name)?xunary operator to create a String from a characterexpr?expr:exprternary operatorAnd so…
puts "".empty? ? ?t:?f