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

[Brendan Eich]

Allen Wirfs-Brock wrote:
> yes, that's what I was proposing.  I think calls need to be part of the overall discussion for this feature area.

Jeremy is kindly grepping more codebases, but just from CoffeeScript 
(self-hosted) source itself, ?. is 42, ?[ is 7, and ?( is 3 -- so 
12:2:1. Supports deferring ?( for now given syntax issue, but the 
counter-argument is that we might solve syntax holistically a different 
way. One idea:

foo.?bar instead of foo?.bar

which enables

foo(? args )

instead of

foo?( args )

and implies

foo[? index ]

This is infelicitous compared to putting ? first because it separates 
the ? from the maybe-nully left operand too much, and looks ugly (to 
Spanish readers it looks even more wrong).

The other idea mooted:

foo?:( args )

runs into the X ?: Y problem -- that should mean X ? X : Y per GNU C and 
intuition, but the : in the middle of ?:( doesn't mean any such thing.

My super-flammable straw syntax of foo?.(args) has a similarly inapt dot 
in the middle.

Suggestions welcome. If we must get maybe-call in or at least 
future-proof the syntax for it a bit, now is the time.

/be