Feature #12929: ternary should look ahead w/in a block (and not care about newlines)

• Status: Rejected
• Assignee: matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
• Target version: -

[ag4ve (shawn wilson)]

foo = (bar ? 0 : 1) # works
foo = (bar ?
  0 : 1) # works
foo = (bar
  ? 0
  : 1) # doesn't work

[duerst (Martin Dürst)]

In Ruby, all operators have to be written at the end of the line to make it possible to distinguish between complete statements (with a missing semicolon) and continuations.

The only exception is the '.' operator, which is allowed to be on the next line to make method chaining look better, as follows:

array.map ...
     .select ...
     .reject ...
     .group ...
     .sort ...

What do you think is special about the ternary operator?

[mutantkeyboard (Antonio Nesic)]

• File Screen Shot 2016-11-14 at 10.24.39.png Screen Shot 2016-11-14 at 10.24.39.png added
• ruby -v set to 2.3.1

Martin Dürst wrote:

In Ruby, all operators have to be written at the end of the line to make it possible to distinguish between complete statements (with a missing semicolon) and continuations.

The only exception is the '.' operator, which is allowed to be on the next line to make method chaining look better, as follows:

array.map ...
     .select ...
     .reject ...
     .group ...
     .sort ...

What do you think is special about the ternary operator?

I think that this is what he meant. If he uses IRB, then the syntax error comes up like:

SyntaxError: (irb):14: syntax error, unexpected '?', expecting ')'
	from /Users/antonionesic/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.3.1/bin/irb:11:in `<main>'

But I have to agree. This is a SyntaxError, and not a bug.
Ticket should be closed.

[nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada)]

• Tracker changed from Bug to Feature
• Description updated (diff)
• Status changed from Open to Assigned
• Assignee set to matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)

It is not a bug, and easy to extend the parser to allow that syntax, but doesn't look nice to me.

[nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada)]

https://github.com/ruby/ruby/compare/trunk...nobu:feature/12929-ternary

[matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)]

I don't think it's worth modifying the syntax. If you want to write complex conditional code, use if-statement.

Matz.

[jeremyevans0 (Jeremy Evans)]

• Status changed from Assigned to Rejected