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Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2020 05:11:08 -0600
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To: Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Ternary operator associativity
From: ryan.jentzsch@gmail.com (Ryan Jentzsch)

Is there a possibility this can be fixed in version 8? From
http://phpsadness.com/sad/30 listed as an outright bug (I don't have
the C skills to fix this. I am just raising this as an issue that has
been a criticism of PHP for many years now with a new major version
upcoming that could allow for a b/c of this significance to improve
the language):

The ternary operator is left-associative and therefore behaves
entirely incorrectly:

$ cat ternary.php
<?php
echo (FALSE ? "a" : FALSE ? "b" : "c")."\n";
echo (FALSE ? "a" : TRUE ? "b" : "c")."\n";
echo (TRUE ? "a" : FALSE ? "b" : "c")."\n";
echo (TRUE ? "a" : TRUE ? "b" : "c")."\n";
?>

$ php ternary.php
c
b
b
b

In any other language with a ternary operator, you can stack them and
build an if-elseif-elseif-else expression:

$ cat ternary.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

print +(0 ? "a" : 0 ? "b" : "c")."\n";
print +(0 ? "a" : 1 ? "b" : "c")."\n";
print +(1 ? "a" : 0 ? "b" : "c")."\n";
print +(1 ? "a" : 1 ? "b" : "c")."\n";

$ perl ternary.pl
c
b
a
a