||= is much needed?

[Brendan Eich]

Wes Garland wrote:
> > This breaks from JS's C-inspired assignment operators, but perhaps 
> we can live with it.
>
> FWIW -- I was confused when I first read ||=, I thought it was 
> supposed to be some kind of Boolean-coercing variant on |=. Now I see 
> that it is more like ?= from GNU make.

We could use ?= instead. Good point. This avoids the dual semantics for 
A op= B split on whether op is || (an existing operator, unlike lone ?).

> What do you think of GCC's ?: operator? It is basically a special form 
> of the ternary operator, and while not the same as your propsal, it 
> addresses many of the same use cases.

That's ok as an alternative to ?? but would you want ?:= as the 
assignment form? I'd rather lose the colon.

Given ?=, people may wish for A ? B instead of A ?? B, but then we have 
nasty issues with respect to ternary:

A ? B ? C : D

Is this (A ? B) ? C : D or A ? (B ? C) : D. We can disambiguate in the 
formal grammar but readers may rebel.

It's possible ?? or however we spell it isn't worth adding, while ?= is. 
The conditional assignment to default or normalize is the prime use-case.

Even then, we have lingering debates over falsy vs. null-or-undefined 
vs. undefined only. CoffeeScript does null-or-undefined, IIRC.

/be
>
> (I've been happy with it for a long time).
>
> Wes
>
> -- 
> Wesley W. Garland
> Director, Product Development
> PageMail, Inc.
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