ternary operator

[Paul Rubin]

Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> writes:
> You're right about Algol. No short circuiting conditionals. I don't
> remember if the "block expression" was an Algol-W ism or from Algol 60.

What exactly do you mean by "short circuiting conditionals"?

I thought it just meant something like C's ternary operator.
Algol 60 had something like that.  You could say 

   x = if a>=0 then sqrt(a) else sqrt(-a);

which would take the square root of the absolute value of a.
Short circuiting just means the non-selected branch doesn't get evaluated.