The danger here is that this will fall through to the falseaction if trueaction returns a false result ("", False, 0, None, [], {}, etc). For example, this will evaluate to "etc":

  True and "" or "etc"

So people started doing this instead, as [False] is still 'true' (non-empty lists are 'true' in Python):

  (condition and [trueaction] or [falseaction])[0]

... which is a bit crufty. So this was added:

  trueaction if condition else falseaction