simple shorter function syntax

[Brendan Eich]

On Jul 23, 2010, at 10:27 AM, Oliver Hunt wrote:

[Good point about LL(∞) snipped.]

> *  To give you an idea of how important parsing is, the 280 North folk once told me that parsing made up 25% of the load time for 280 Slides.

Ollie, was that with browser-side Objective-J compilation, or with the server translating and feeding the Obj-J-lowered-to-JS code to the browser?

I have polled audiences at talks in the last year about shorter function syntax, see first two links at http://brendaneich.com/presentations/. Results mainly for fun but somewhat informative (to me at any rate) were not resoundingly in favor of a new and much shorter keyword to use instead of function.

This was before http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:shorter_function_syntax was proposed, so I didn't ask the audiences to clap for its # syntax.

People like the expression-closure idea, although syntax needs to be hammered out. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en/new_in_javascript_1.8#Expression_closures_%28Merge_into_own_page.2fsection%29

/be