Waldemar Horwat wrote:
> David-Sarah Hopwood wrote:
>> I'll repeat my argument here for convenience:
>>
>> A DivisionPunctuator must be preceded by an expression.
>> A RegularExpressionLiteral is itself an expression.
>>
>> (This assumes that the omission of RegularExpressionLiteral from
>> Literal is a bug.)
>>
>> Therefore, for there to exist syntactic contexts in which either
>> a DivisionPunctuator or a RegularExpressionLiteral could occur,
>> it would have to be possible for an expression to immediately
>> follow [*] another expression with no intervening operator.
>> The only case in which that can occur is where a semicolon is
>> automatically inserted between the two expressions.
>> Assume that case: then the second expression cannot begin
>> with [*] a token whose first character is '/', because that
>> would have been interpreted as a DivisionPunctuator, and so
>> no semicolon insertion would have occurred (because semicolon
>> insertion only occurs where there would otherwise have been a
>> syntax error); contradiction.
>
> Yes, I verified when we were writing ES3 that this was the only case
> where the syntactic grammar permitted a / to serve as both a division
> (or division-assignment) and a regexp literal. The interaction of
> lexing and semicolon insertion would have been unclear (how can you say
> that the next token is invalid if you don't know how to lex it?), so we
> wrote the spec to explicitly resolve those in favor of division.
If that is what the note is intended to clarify, I think its current
wording is more confusing than helpful. It certainly confused me.
Anyway, there is no case in which a regexp needs to be parenthesized
to avoid lexical ambiguity.
How about replacing the current wording by something that specifically
discusses the semicolon insertion issue, with an example:
There are two goal symbols for the lexical grammar. The InputElementDiv
symbol is used in those syntactic grammar contexts where a leading
division (/) or division-assignment (/=) operator is permitted. The
InputElementRegExp symbol is used in other syntactic grammar contexts.
NOTE
There are no syntactic grammar contexts where both a leading division
or division-assignment, and a leading RegularExpressionLiteral are
permitted. This is not affected by semicolon insertion (section 7.9);
in examples such as the following:
a = b
/hi/g.exec(c).map(d);
where the first non-whitespace, non-comment character after a
LineTerminator is '/' and the syntactic context allows division or
division-assignment, no semicolon is inserted at the LineTerminator.
That is, this example is interpreted in the same way as:
a = b / hi / g.exec(c).map(d);
--
David-Sarah Hopwood ⚥
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