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

With C# 7, you can use the new ref locals feature to simplify the conditional assignment of ref-compatible variables. So now, not only can you do:

int i = 0;

T b = default(T), c = default(T);

// initialization of C#7 'ref-local' variable using a conditional r-value⁽¹⁾

ref T a = ref (i == 0 ? ref b : ref c);

...but also the extremely wonderful:

// assignment of l-value⁽²⁾ conditioned by C#7 'ref-locals'

(i == 0 ? ref b : ref c) = a;

That line of code assigns the value of a to either b or c, depending on the value of i.

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Notes
1. r-value is the right-hand side of an assignment, the value that gets assigned.
2. l-value is the left-hand side of an assignment, the variable that receives the assigned value.