This little trick is rather useless, I admit, but a fun piece of trivia (I'm interviewing some students now for a position, and so I've been collecting fun bits of trivial trivia). If you prefer if/else, be my guest… it is a little more readable, but sometimes, you have a long and complex statement that you really don't want to rewrite, or a print statement that needs some text:

max = (i>j) ? i : j;

instead of:

if (i>j)
  max = i;
else
  max = j;

I assume you also prefer brackets, which means you might have:

if (i>j) {
  max = i;
} else {
  max = j;
}

Is that really better? Sometimes, cleaner code is when you can see the entire thing on one screen, instead of having a really long spread out function.

Also, compare:

if (0 == stat) {
  printf("Test number %d (input parameters %d, %04X, %6f) passed (status code %d)\n",index, foo, bar, fubar, stat);
} else {
  printf("Test number %d (input parameters %d, %04X, %6f) failed (status code %d)\n",index, foo, bar, fubar, stat);
}

with

printf("Test number %d (input parameters %d, %04X, %6f) %s (status code %d)\n",index, foo, bar, fubar, (0 == stat) ? "passed" : "failed", stat);

I'm no big-time C hacker, but C++ code is a major part of my job, and it seems to me that if/else is a great deal more readable, even for little one- or two-liners. The main utilities of ?/:, it seems to me, are to help you save a few bytes on the hard drive where you keep your code and to keep the ? and : characters from feeling bad for being left out of the language specification.