Slightly preceding Ulf's coin proposal by a few hours was
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/coin-dev/2009-March/001134.html
Where I suggested the "naked dot" notation (coined in
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/coin-dev/2009-March/000855.html)
has better value as ".. a
syntax for referring to the receiver of a method inside arguments to the
method."
More formally, the naked dot (at the start of an expression, not
following an invocation to a void method) would refer to the receiver of
the innermost surrounding invocation expression.
and so to answer Guy's question below in terms of my original intention
rather than Ulf's proposal, .indexof("Q") would use
myVeryLongNamedString as its receiver.
I see particular value for these naked dot expressions in creating
fluent APIs such as builder patterns. As suggested in my coin post,
there is also value for passing enums or named constants to methods when
(as is often the case) these named constants are defined in the same
class as the method being invoked. In a highly informal sense, the naked
dot enables on demand changing of the scope to be that of the invocation
expression's receiver,
I think with this interpretation of the meaning of naked or leading dot,
Guy's compromise restriction below is not required.
Bruce
On 27/03/2014 4:51 a.m., Guy Steele wrote:
I am a bit more skeptical about expressions that begin with a dot because of
potential
confusion about which expression is referred to:
myVeryLongNamedString.subString(.indexOf("C”), .indexOf("Q”))
seems clear enough, but what about:
myVeryLongNamedString.subString(.indexOf("C”) + otherString.length(),
.indexOf("Q”))
Does the second occurrence of .indexOf use myVeryLongNamedString or otherString?
A compromise would be to allow leading-dot expressions to occur only within the
arguments
of the method call whose target is the object which the leading-dot expressions
are expected
to use as their target, and if there are such leading-dot expressions within
the arguments
then the arguments must not contain any non-leading-dot field references or
method calls.
Just a thought for discussion. This would be considered a separate mechanism
from the
chaining-of-void-methods mechanism (it was a very clever idea to try to unify
them in Ulf's
original proposal, though).
—Guy
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