It is not necessary that the conditional operator be used on the right-hand side of an assignment—it can be used in any situation in which an expression could be used. This means that you could display the sign of the variable number, without first assigning it to a variable, using a printf statement as shown:
printf ("Sign = %i\n", ( number < 0 ) ? –1 : ( number == 0 ) ? 0 : 1);