On May 20, 2011, at 7:07 AM, Claus Reinke wrote:

>> we should focus on the harder nut to crack (the leading parenthesized 
>> parameter list).
> 
> Isn't that an example of issues that would not exist if
> arrow functions had a prefix marker?

It is a deeper issue. ECMA-262 currently covers left-hand side of assignment 
with LeftHandSideExpression, but that produces 42, not a valid LHS. Semantic 
checks and mandatory errors in spec prose make up for the lack of a precise 
grammar.

ES5, Clause 16, has

"Attempts to call PutValue on any value for which an early determination can be 
made that the value is not a Reference (for example, executing the assignment 
statement 3=4)."

Destructuring assignment -- not the binding forms, e.g. let {x, y} = obj; but 
just assignment expressions, {x, y} = obj -- takes advantage of this cover 
grammar approach, but it will require semantic checks. And as Waldemar points 
out, this constrains RHS "structuring" via object and array initialisers to 
have the same syntax (unless we add more semantic post-grammar restrictions 
there too!) as the LHS destructuring patterns.

This may be a bad constraint. Type guards don't seem like they'll be only LHS 
or RHS, indeed the :: choice for guard prefix was based on easy composing of 
guards after property names in object initialisers. But some future extension 
might want LHS and RHS to diverge.

Arrow functions really do want a different ArrorFormalParameters sub-grammar 
from ( Expression ) where Expression is of course a comma-expression.

So I'm investigating GLR parsing. It can handle all of these cases without 
ambiguity. It does not require implementatoins to have forking parsers, but it 
is an attractive spec tool. More on this in a bit.

/be

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