That's possible but it is a bit ugly, isn't it?
Also, as dherman observed, ?. and variations are different from
defaulting, in one point of view. That is, avoiding dereferencing a
value that does not coerce to object is the purpose of ?. but not
necessarily of ??= (or || as used for defaulting today).
We could use ?obj as a prefix form for testing whether obj is not null
or undefined, but it would then lead to doubled ?? when put in the
"then" part of a ?: ternary.
Using ?? as a suffix form is even uglier in a ternary: obj???wut:lol.
We already have obj != null for testing whether obj is not null or
undefined, so that takes away a lot of the pressure for unary ??.
My current thinking is:
(a) ?? and ??= as proposed in
http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:default_operator
(undefined-only).
(b) ||= as a freebie since || is in the language and useful for
falsy-defaulting (latent bugs notwithstanding).
(c) ?. as proposed in
http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:existential_operator.
(d) obj.maybeMethod?.(args) for what CoffeeScript calls ?(.
/be
Domenic Denicola wrote:
What struck me from Jeremy's explanation was the uniformity of CoffeeScript's ?
operator (modulo the small issue he mentioned for function calls). It seems to
combine the currently-strawman'ed ??/??= and ?. into one very simple semantic.
What about adopting ?? as CoffeeScript's ? operator? Would this solve the
lookahead problems? So you could do
object.property??.other.properties.go.here
object.method??(args)
This would unfortunately imply, for uniformity, that
object ?? other
object ??= other
become null + undefined tests instead of just undefined. But that might be
worth paying.
For the record that leaves object?? as the only unimplemented CoffeeScript
counterpart.
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