Benefits of using the conditional ?: (ternary) operator

Question

What are the benefits and drawbacks of the ?: operator as opposed to the standard if-else statement. The obvious ones being:

Conditional ?: Operator

Answer 1

I usually choose a ternary operator when I'd have a lot of duplicate code otherwise.

if (a > 0)
    answer = compute(a, b, c, d, e);
else
    answer = compute(-a, b, c, d, e);

With a ternary operator, this could be accomplished with the following.

answer = compute(a > 0 ? a : -a, b, c, d, e);