Another short post. It’s because I’m working on something.<\/p>\n
A lot of languages have a ternary operator, that lets you do this:<\/p>\n\n
int<\/span> x =<\/span> foo ?<\/span> 1<\/span> :<\/span> 2<\/span>;<\/span><\/pre><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\nIt’s an easy way to pack a conditional on to one line, especially useful when giving things default values. Another way is if the if<\/code> statement returns a value, like in Ruby:<\/p>\n\nx = if<\/span> foo\n 1<\/span>\n else<\/span>\n 2<\/span>\n end<\/span><\/pre><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n<\/p>\n
Lua doesn’t have this. The best we can do is just write the if statement, which is unwieldy, especially if it’s several lines long:<\/p>\n\n
local<\/span> x\nif<\/span> foo then<\/span> x =<\/span> 1<\/span> else<\/span> x =<\/span> 2<\/span> end<\/span><\/pre><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\nWell, I noticed that we have another way of doing this. It turns out I’m not the first person to think of this, it was pointed out in the wiki<\/a>, which is actually probably where I got it from. But it’s useful:<\/p>\n\nlocal<\/span> x =<\/span> foo and<\/span> 1<\/span> or<\/span> 2<\/span><\/pre><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\nBecause boolean operators return values (other than true\/false) and they have precedence like you’d expect, this works perfectly. You can even chain them together:<\/p>\n\n