Maybe ternaries aren't easier to read, but they make the surrounding code easier to read because they duck out of the way? Devoting several lines to what is a very quick if/else expression could be distracting I suppose. Playing devil's advocate.
It's important to note that ternaries are expressions, they evaluate to a value. When I see a ternary I know that a boolean is being mapped to a value. This is true both technically and almost always in practice.
If-statements are the wild west. Who knows what an if statement will do? An if-statement may be as simple as a ternary, or it might be a branch point and the resulting logic streams will never meet again.
There’s the condition (evaluated first), the true case and the false case. Only one of the cases is evaluated.
I’m assuming you were alluding to some sort of “x++ = x++ * *x++” style situation, but the ternary expression isn’t a statement and there are sequence points in between. As a bonus, the first result for “ternary operator evaluation order” gave me someone who linked to the standard [1]. Quoting from the standard that they quoted:
> The first operand is evaluated; there is a sequence point between its evaluation and the evaluation of the second or third operand (whichever is evaluated). The second operand is evaluated only if the first compares unequal to 0; the third operand is evaluated only if the first compares equal to 0; the result is the value of the second or third operand(whichever is evaluated), converted to the type described below.
I was not thinking about local state; you're right that the sequence points ensure an orderly evaluation there.
My point was that since ternaries can call functions, and functions can have side effects on global state, the concept of an "if" being a "statement" vs a ternary being an "expression / value" is not nearly as meaningful as it's made out to be. A ternary can trade stocks, fire a 500W laser, unlock a velociraptor enclosure, etc, just as easily as an if can.
