ternary operator

[Andrew Koenig]

David> Life gets "interesting" if there is a side effect in the
David> unevaluated portion of the conditional:

David> 	if a > b and c < d():
David> 		print e

David> d() might never get called. Not good if d() does something you
David> depend on.

On the other hand, short-circuiting greatly simplifies the
implementation of a number of commonly used algorithms:

        i = 0
        while i < len(x) and x[i] != y:
                i += 1

Try writing this loop without short-circuiting and see how much more
complicated it becomes.

-- 
Andrew Koenig, ark at research.att.com, http://www.research.att.com/info/ark