On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 7:27 AM, Jussi Kalliokoski <
[email protected]> wrote:
> 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;
> }
>
>
This particular syntax would also require static (a lookahead) and semantic
(based on the lookahead results) disambiguation to account for
DecimalLiteral:
var n = .2;
If the "." was on the other side?
AccessorAssignmentOperator :
.= IdentifierName
var string = " a ";
string .= trim(); // would throw if no `trim` method existed for `string`
string; // "a";
Where ".=" means assign the result of "Property Accessors Runtime Semantics
Evaluation" with lval and rval in appropriate positions (TBH, I'm sure I
missed something in there)
Rick
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