What Does the Term 'Ternary' Mean in Ternary Expressions?

Ternary expressions are a widely used conditional construct in various programming languages, consisting of three components: a condition, the true result expression, and the false result expression. The term 'ternary' specifically refers to this three-part structure. Its basic form is:

shell
condition ? trueResult : falseResult

When the condition evaluates to true, the ternary expression evaluates to the true result expression; when the condition evaluates to false, it evaluates to the false result expression.

Here is a specific example to illustrate the use of ternary expressions:

shell
int x = 10;
int y = 20;
int max = x > y ? x : y;

In this Java code example, we use the ternary expression to determine the value of the max variable. The condition is x > y; if true, max is assigned the value of x; if false, max is assigned the value of y. In this case, since x is less than y, the condition is false, so max takes the value of y, which is 20.