The reason to a style guide is not that one style is inherently better than another. It is because consistency makes the code easier to read for anyone familiar with that style. Part of that means using common idioms that are immediately recognizable by someone familiar with the style. This reduces the amount of time is takes someone to understand the code.
We want to make the code easy to read, since time spent in maintenance is much greater than the time spent initially writing it. This means that being clever when writing code is a _bad_ thing if it reduces readability. There is plenty of use of the ternary operator in the OpenBSD code base but it tends to be used sparingly. Nesting the ternary operator must be done with care due to C's operator precedence. We've seen bugs in the past due to this. In other words, just because you can doesn't mean you should ;-) What one person finds clear and obvious may seem obfuscated to someone else. We try to use a consistent style so that everyone can read and understand the code once they are familiar with that style and common idioms. - todd
