You made a great point, indirectly; a lot of the confusion from the original line of code is the crappy naming of the variables. They should have thrown in sta

You made a great point, indirectly; a lot of the confusion from the original line of code is the crappy naming of the variables. They should have thrown in sta and stat to really amp up the Scrabble-like atmosphere. Once you clearly distinguish the purpose of each variable with a well chosen name, as you did in your rewrite, the code suddenly lights up the room. Good variable names are important! The linebreak to break up the three-way expression also helps to suggest the order of evaluation. For some reason, our brains do not appreciate nested ternary operators on the same line. It's the same problem as A==B ? C : D==E ? F : G; If you are familiar with the left- or right-associativity of the operator, this isn't impossible to read. For instance, if you write C, you already know it's right-associative and therefore executes much like it reads from left to right. If so, it's still nicer to convey that with some line breaks: A==B ? C : D==E ? F : G ; On the other hand, if you are using a language like PHP where it's left-associative, or you're not 100% positive either way, you will be shooting yourself in the foot trying to do something like that and brilliantly misleading anybody else that reads the code.