I took my comments about ?...: notation out. Basically, at a syntactic level its tempting to regard ? as "the operator" and : as some other operator but really the ternary operation only exists as some hypothetical function in 3 arguments:

  ternary(condition, true-path, false-path)

which executes either true-path or false-path depending on condition. But in notational terms, how "big" condition and true and false parts are is rather unconstrained, so you wind up with the ? and the : widely separated. They aren't operators in the higher sense: they're the syntax which forms the ternary operation as a whole over the expression and it's condition.

Lexing bleeds into syntax and syntax bleeds into semantics.

:. is a possible faux-pas in lexing the sentence around the ?...: construct because of :. being unfortunate.