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ternary

   Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Medical, Wikipedia, Hutchinson 0.01 sec.
ternary
1. Maths
a. (of a number system) to the base three
b. involving or containing three variables
2. (of an alloy, mixture, or chemical compound) having three different components or composed of three different elements
ternary [′tər·nə·rē]
(science and technology)
Consisting of three, as in a three-phase (that is, ternary) liquid system.
(programming)ternary - A description of an operator taking three arguments. The only common example is C's ?: operator which is used in the form "CONDITION ? EXP1 : EXP2" and returns EXP1 if CONDITION is true else EXP2. Haskell has a similar "if CONDITION then EXP1 else EXP2" operator.

See also unary, binary.


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? Mentioned in ? References in classic literature
 
A naturalist, struck by a parallelism of this nature in any one class, by arbitrarily raising or sinking the value of the groups in other classes (and all our experience shows that this valuation has hitherto been arbitrary), could easily extend the parallelism over a wide range; and thus the septenary, quinary, quaternary, and ternary classifications have probably arisen.
The Origin of Species by Darwin, Charles View in context
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