Throughout my history with JS (and pretty much every programming language
I've used) I've always found one thing really awkward: reassigning a
variable to the result of its method.
Say you have code like this:
var foo = function (options) {
var string = something();
if ( options.stripWhiteSpace ) {
string = string.trim();
}
// do something else here...
};
The same thing applies to pretty much all methods that return a modified
version of the same type of the variable, e.g. replace, filter, map,
concat, etc., you name it.
As a comparison let's say we had Number#add() and no operators for the add
method:
var bar = function (firstNumber, secondNumber) {
var thirdNumber = 5;
if ( firstNumber > 0 ) {
secondNumber = secondNumber.add(thirdNumber);
}
firstNumber = firstNumber.add(secondNumber);
};
whereas with the operators we have the convenience of combining the
operator with the assignment to avoid typing the variable name twice:
var bar = function (firstNumber, secondNumber) {
var thirdNumber = 5;
if ( firstNumber > 0 ) {
secondNumber += thirdNumber;
}
firstNumber += secondNumber;
};
I don't really know what would be a good solution for this problem, hence I
wanted to share this here if we can figure out a nicer way to do these
kinds of things. The best I can think of is some syntax like this:
var foo = function (options) {
var string = something();
if ( options.stripWhiteSpace ) {
string = .trim();
}
// do something else here...
};
so basically the operator would a combination of assignment followed by
property access dot, then the method name and invocation. This could also
allow plain property access so you could for example say `foo = .first` or
something. The reason I don't like this syntax is that it might be
conflicting with other some ideas thrown around to replace `with`, e.g.:
using (foo) {
.remove(x);
var x = .size;
}
- Jussi
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