Existential operator (was: ||= is much needed?)

[Allen Wirfs-Brock]

On Jun 20, 2012, at 10:45 AM, Brendan Eich wrote:

> Allen Wirfs-Brock wrote:
>> I was hypothesizing that Brendan's semantics would seldom be the programer's intent for person?.getName() . If an exception was acceptable, why wouldn't you just say:
> 
> Because it's rare to have a maybe-method called on a maybe-object, based on CoffeeScript experience and design. Please don't personalize this -- I wrote the strawman to capture what CoffeeScript has user-tested. Any bugs are mine, but they're also not (necessarily) intended.

nothing personal intended, just a sloppy way to refer to your strawman.

> ...
> Again, I do not see the point in gratuitously differing from CoffeeScript without reason. One might argue that since we cannot use ?( as CS does, we should make ?. soak up call TypeErrors. Could be, but I didn't propose anything for call yet and this discussion seems worth beating into the ground a bit more before I do :-).

yes, that's what I was proposing.  I think calls need to be part of the overall discussion for this feature area. 

Allen