Rationalizing ASI (was: simple shorter function syntax)

[Brendan Eich]

On Jul 25, 2010, at 2:02 PM, David Herman wrote:

>> Mark's restricted production for CallExpression attacks the hazard even more directly, but apart from our aversion to restricted productions, what might it break?
> 
> I don't see offhand what it might break. This question seems easy to investigate empirically-- crawl the web looking for "violations" of the restriction.
> 
> Personally, I'm not enthusiastic about this line of pursuit. It smells of excessive fool-proofing. Ad-hoc restrictions seem both unlikely to provide clear guarantees and likely to have unintended consequences. Irregular syntax is bumpy terrain; obfuscation we will always have with us. In the absence of strong evidence of a need, I'd prefer to relegate such syntactic restrictions to third-party lint tools and let them experiment with them. Just my $.02.

I tend to agree, see "quixotic", "snipe hunt", etc. words in my recent posts.

Also, not another restricted production! But hats off to Mark for proposing it, since it zeroes in on the hard case.

A good es-discuss thread (it's not like we have too many going at once) can clarify what may seem murky or overcomplicated issues. Just the emotion around ASI makes me want to reach for greater clarify and (if possible) improvements down the line. But yeah, it's low priority and the risk for reward looks high.

Google-sized code studying would be helpful. Can it be done? codesearch.google.com is not up to it, you need to parse.

/be