Broadcom Open-Sources Wireless Drivers

The ternary operator is dissapointed.


/*
Description: This function saturate input 32 bit number into a 16 bit number.
If input number is greater than 0x7fff then output is saturated to 0x7fff.
else if input number is less than 0xffff8000 then output is saturated to 0xffff8000
else output is same as input.
*/
int16 qm_sat32(int32 op)
{
    int16 result;
    if (op > (int32) 0x7fff) {
        result = 0x7fff;
    } else if (op < (int32) 0xffff8000) {
        result = (int16) (0x8000);
    } else {
        result = (int16) op;
    }
    return result;
}

The ternary operator ultimately ends up being pretty useless. It's always the case when using the ternary operator that you lose readability for the sake of reducing the number of lines written, while gaining sometimes literally nothing in terms of efficiency and certainly not clarity. It's one of those nice programming ideas that ends up not being very useful in practice. It seems more suitable for functional programming languages than for imperative languages like C.