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

While the above answers are valid, and I agree with readability being important, there are 2 further points to consider:

1. In C#6, you can have expression-bodied methods.

This makes it particularly concise to use the ternary:

string GetDrink(DayOfWeek day) 
   => day == DayOfWeek.Friday
      ? "Beer" : "Tea";

2. Behaviour differs when it comes to implicit type conversion.

If you have types T1 and T2 that can both be implicitly converted to T, then the below does not work:

T GetT() => true ? new T1() : new T2();

(because the compiler tries to determine the type of the ternary expression, and there is no conversion between T1 and T2.)

On the other hand, the if/else version below does work:

T GetT()
{
   if (true) return new T1();
   return new T2();
}

because T1 is converted to T and so is T2