Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

For the more curious: conditional operators

It is not uncommon to use if and else to set the value of an instance variable. For example, you might have the following code:

int minutesPerPound;
if (isBoneless) {
    minutesPerPound = 15;
} else {
    minutesPerPound = 20;
}

Whenever you have a scenario where a value is assigned to a variable based on a conditional, you have a candidate for the conditional operator, which is ?. (You will sometimes see it called the ternary operator because it takes three operands).

int minutesPerPound = isBoneless ? 15 : 20;

This one line is equivalent to the previous example. Instead of writing if and else, you write an assignment. The part before the ? is the conditional. The values after the