simple shorter function syntax

[Oliver Hunt]

On Jul 23, 2010, at 10:32 AM, Brendan Eich wrote:

> 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 believe it was with the browser being passed preprocessed source, but i'll harass them to find out.

> 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

I personally am not too fussed about the reduced typing -- if people really wanted reduced typing we could simply adopt "\" which seems to be the common symbol used for a function.  

> 
> /be