Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Composed of three or arranged in threes.
- adjective Having the base three.
- adjective Involving three variables.
- noun A group of three.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Proceeding by threes; consisting of three: as, a ternary flower (that is, one having three members in each cycle); a ternary chemical substance (that is, one composed of three elements).
- noun The number three; a group of three.
- In mathematics, having three variables.
- In old chemistry, applied by Dalton to substances consisting of three atoms — either A + 2 B or 2 A + B.
- noun A trinity.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun A ternion; the number three; three things taken together; a triad.
- adjective Proceeding by threes; consisting of three.
- adjective (Chem.) Containing, or consisting of, three different parts, as elements, atoms, groups, or radicals, which are regarded as having different functions or relations in the molecule.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective Made up of
three things;treble ,triadic ,triple ,triplex - adjective Arranged in
groups of three - adjective mathematics To the
base three - adjective mathematics Having three
variables - noun A group of three things; a
trio ,threesome ortierce
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective having three units or components or elements
- noun the cardinal number that is the sum of one and one and one
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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The Python ternary is that undead () if 'yes' else 'grr. argh.'
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A century earlier, Franco of Cologne had explicitly associated the idea of ternary rhythm with the Christian trinity, but from now onwards, every value had to be able to be divided by either two or three.
Archive 2009-04-01 Lu 2009
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The lottery schemes are what is known as the ternary combination of seventy-eight numbers, being one to seventy eight, inclusive; or, in other words, 'three number' schemes.
The Secrets of the Great City James Dabney McCabe 1862
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Because most languages only have one operator that requires three arguments, it is known as the ternary operator, although in theory there could be more.
TechRepublic Blogs 2009
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This is essentially an if statement but in a more concise form known as a ternary operator, and would be no different than writing:
doggdot.us 2009
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Lines 5 through 7 use a "ternary" operator that basically says, "If the left css property equals 0, move the element to the left as many pixels as it is wide (including padding and border); if not, move it back to 0."
Learning jQuery 2009
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"The lottery schemes are what is known as the ternary combination of seventy-eight numbers, being one to seventy-eight, inclusive; or in other words, 'three number' schemes.
Lights and Shadows of New York Life or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City James Dabney McCabe 1862
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I must say that Python's ternary operator is really ugly, though.
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You can easily replicate ternary functionality using tuples then the conditional to select the appropriate one. e.g. ( "b", "a") [True] 'a'
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If you want it to read like a typical ternary, you can do 'cond and "a" or "b"' to achieve the same result. e.g. True and "a" or "b"
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