Does Objective-C have an even shorter way of writing this line of code?
a = b ? b : c;
That is, a way to say, a is equal to <
a
Does the following work for you:
a = b ? : c;
(This syntax is a GNU extension to C, so you might have to use the GCC and not LLVM - http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-3.2.3/gcc/Conditionals.html#Conditionals).