How to use the Conditional (ternary) operator:

[Bazzy]

It isn't really needed as the article section has only two pages. If you need an article you can just use Ctrl+F

[firedraco]

And we would still have the issue of random people coming on and posting spam...maybe we could restrict it like links, you have to have a certain # or posts or time to be able to edit.

[chrisname]

It's not a problem in itself; I just find it annoying that every site has a wiki. It's almost like trying to fit in...

[Bazzy]

A wiki may likely break the consistency of the website look, 99% of them are just as Wikipedia with a different logo

[chrisname]

Yeah; and to be honest, this website is incredibly well designed. The look is consistent and well laid-out. A little 'plain' in places, but like that matters. I also think the logo is excellent.

[Bazzy]

This is the only forum in which I'm active just because it's simple - without flashy advertisements, distracting pictures, signatures etc
All the text you read here is useful - or at least written by a user ...

^{_{This thread looks more a lounge one than an article now...}}

[chrisname]

All the text you read here is useful

I disagree :P but I know what you're getting at. There are very rarely huge GIFs or FLVs staring at you, it doesn't take too long to download the page (it's almost instant usually) and it still looks nice.

True, never mind.

[kempofighter]

I've been reading the discussions on the general opinion of the articles forum and would like to state a few opinions on the matter. I am not going to stick around and argue the points back and forth but would like to just state a few opinions.

First, I thought that the criticism regarding the use of the term ternary operator vs conditional operator was really nitpicky and unnecessary. This forum significantly limits the amount that you can post in a single article which forces us to keep things fairly simple. The purpose of the article wasn't to give a history lesson on C vs. C++. Articles don't have to be written by condescending "experts" who think that they know everything that there is to know. What's wrong with someone that has a few years of experience or less writing a couple of paragraphs about a particular feature of the language?

The majority of the articles are helpful. I don't deny that there are some that I didn't care for but that is an acceptable tradeoff in my opinion. Here we have an opportunity to give anyone the ability to write and article (which the writer will learn a lot from as well). If a particular article is totally unacceptable, you can certainly report it and state the reason for reporting it. It would also be nice if the articles had voting buttons so that users can give 5 stars to the most useful ones. If we had a voting mechanism then other users could filter out the ones that flagged as being poorly written. You could also create a voting mechanism similar to yahoo answers that allows voting only by members with a certain number of posts or reputation points. That would require some modifications to the webiste but might be a useful improvement.

I'm not crazy about the overuse of the wiki concept. If you want to read wiki, go to wikipedia then. At work, we have wiki sites that are spinoffs from wiki but I have never found them to be useful because in most cases it is redundant and less useful then the real wiki. Plus I like the idea of the thread concept. Only posters should be able to edit their own content. I dislike the idea that you can write an article and then anyone in the world can edit what you write directly. If people want to make suggestions, I'd rather see separate posts.

Finally, to address the concerns about articles leading to long threads (like this one) why not let the person who wrote the article delete unrelated posts? or as I said before, have a voting mechanism so that if someone tries to hijack the thread and start a new discussion it can be reported and removed by the webmaster? Speaking of which, this entire thread of discussion about articles should probably be moved to the lounge. If anyone wants to continue the discussion it'd be best to just create a new thread in the lounge.

[chrisname]

I agree with all of what you said above.

What's wrong with someone that has a few years of experience or less

Actually, less than one; 8 months this month I think :P

[demosthenes2k8]

To try to stay on topic, there's another fun thing that you can do:

#include <iostream>
#include <ctime>
using namespace std;

int main()
{
    srand(time(NULL));
    int a=0,b=0;
    ((rand()%2)?a:b)=5;
    cout << "A: " << a << "\nB: " << b << endl;
    cin.ignore();
    return 0;
}

(compiled with gcc -pedantic)

You can actually use the ternary operator to choose which variable to set!
And I consider it the ternary operator, because (operator1)?operator2:operator3;

[chrisname]

That's cool! I didn't think to try that :)

[turbozedd]

@demosthenes: the pieces you labaled "operatorX" are operands. n-ary operators take n operands.

I don't think it is a big deal, one name describes the functionality name, the other describes the structure. It is good to state both somewhere in the article for people that have not encountered the other name.

Voting sounds nice, maybe something like slashdot where low rated content is hidden. As well as the ability for an article author to hide any post they want so that they can manage the focus of a reader.

Yay ajax...

[chrisname]

Voting sounds nice, maybe something like slashdot where low rated content is hidden. As well as the ability for an article author to hide any post they want so that they can manage the focus of a reader.

Strong opposition is strong.

I really don't like this idea.