(Almost) everything is expression

[Dmitry Soshnikov]

On 11.11.2011 16:03, gaz Heyes wrote:
>  11/11/2011 08:07, Dmitry Soshnikov :
>
>         Hi,
>
>         (unfortunately Twitter is again doesn't fit for a more than
>         140 ch discussion, so moving here)
>
>         I'd like to still notice the possibility of accepting the
>         "almost everything is expression" approach for JS. After
>         Erlang I very often miss this possibility.
>
>         The idea is to make most of current complex statements as
>         expressions.
>
>         Dave mentioned the proposal with `do { ... }` -- yeah, it's
>         fine, but much nicer is to have "all of them" as expressions.
>         CoffeeScript adopted this style as well.
>
>         Besides, I'd like to note, that the thing is not just
>         "interesting theoretical stuff", but really is very convenient
>         and useful in practice.
>
>         Examples:
>
>         1. Switch-expression (as addition, I eliminated `break`)
>
>         let a = switch (foo) {
>          case 10: 100;
>          default: 200;
>         };
>
>         2. If-expression:
>
>         let a = if (foo) {
>          print('a is foo');
>          foo;
>         } else {
>          // do some longer stuff
>         };
>
>
>
> I think this is a bad idea,

Yeah, "right", this is why it's widely implemented and adopted by many 
languages.

> the difference between a block and expression is difficult enough to 
> decide (from a sandboxing perspective). It would also make missing 
> semi-colons continue the expression and make it really hard for the 
> developer to track down the error and cause unintended behaviour. It 
> adds to the complexity of deciding if a curly is a block or literal 
> and if a "/" is a divide or regexp (which is difficult enough in 
> JavaScript). How on earth would this be backwards compatible too?

Yes, we have to understand which exactly form is useful for example 
block-expressions. But in general I'm talking about all of those 
statements, not just a simple blocks. Though of course example blocks 
are used as parts of e.g. if-statements, etc.

The proposal is _very_ simple -- to allow these statements to stand on 
the RHS. Regarding implementations, the statements already return 
values, so it shoudn't be hard to adopt it.

>
>         We of course already have for years the expression sugar for
>         this -- ? : operator, but it doesn't allow to conveniently
>         have longer bodies of consequent and alternative nodes of
>         if-expression.
>
>
> I'm pretty sure it does: 0?0:0?0:2

I guess you see the point ;)

Dmitry.
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