[benbataille]

> How is this any different than saying "Avoid the + operator at all costs, because behavior is non-trivial and varies from language to language".

I never ever remotely said that. You are putting words in my mouth and I don't like it. I just rightfully pointed that there actually is a semantic difference between the two mentioned lines. I never implied using any of them was wrong. I didn't even emit a judgement of value on either construct.

Now, I don't have problem per see against the conditional operator. It's just not as simple as some people like to pretend and it makes your code depends on some non obvious and not broadly known language feature for what is usually a minimal gain. So, yes, I do tend to avoid it in anything which is going to end in the hand of others (in the same way I try to avoid any un-obvious language idiom as much as possible). It's like nested comprehensions in Python, the slightly shorter code produced is just not worth the added complexity.