Using true and false as the expressions in a conditional operation

c# coding-style readability conditional-operator
Chris Dwyer picture Chris Dwyer · Jul 1, 2010 · Viewed 7.7k times · Source

I'm maintaining some code and have found the following pattern a lot:

var isMale = (row["Gender"].ToString() == "M") ? true : false;

instead of this:

var isMale = (row["Gender"].ToString() == "M");

Is there any reason why anyone would do this? Does anyone think the former is more readable or clearer? Is there some sort of old C "gotcha" that this is a hold-over from?

Answer

bobince picture bobince · Jul 1, 2010

A valid reason? No.

It's usually produced by people who don't really understand that a condition is also in itself an expression, producing a boolean result. In particular, people schooled on a language where this isn't the case, such as many variants of BASIC.

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