A list of ternary operators

Sup nerds, I'm back from SREcon! I had a blast, despite knowing nothing about site reliability engineering and being way over my head in half the talks. I'm trying to catch up on The Book and contract work now so I'll do something silly here: ternary operators.

There's one widespread exception to this categorization: the ternary operator bool ? x : y.2 It's an infix operator that takes exactly three arguments and can't be decomposed into two sequential binary operators. bool ? x makes no sense on its own, nor does x : y.

Other ternary operators are extremely rare, which is why conditional expressions got to monopolize the name "ternary". But I like how exceptional they are and want to compile some of them. A long long time ago I asked Twitter for other ternary operators; this is a compilation of some applicable responses plus my own research.

There's the "base case" of start and endpoints, and an optional step. Many languages have a binary infix op for the base case, but a few also have a ternary for the optional step:

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