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

[Domenic Denicola]

On Jun 21, 2012, at 3:22, "Herby Vojčík" <herby at mailbox.sk> wrote:

> 
> 
> Brendan Eich wrote:
>> Herby Vojčík wrote:
>>> I feel there is objection to introduce magical [[NullPatternObject]]
>>> into language, but all of CS-style soft-accesses could be solved very
>>> cleanly and consistently.
>> 
>> No, because (a) the overhead of a new object is too high; (b) with any
>> kind of suffix-? or suffix-.? as you proposed it would be observable
>> that you get a new object instead of short-circuiting to undefined --
>> the new object is exposed in the language.
> 
> What's wrong with it per se? Let it be exposed, let people use it. Some of uses will be wrong, they will eventually die, some of them will be fine, they survive (no need to add keyword or API for it, null.? yields it and it is usably short).
> 
> And BTW, if foo.? is too long and abuse of dot, you can use for example postfix tilde to get foo~.bar, foo.bar~(), "bar" in foo~ etc.
> 
>> /be
> 
> Herby

Language-level support for the null object pattern would be pretty excellent! I think, given the CoffeeScript grep stats (not to mention common `options = options || {}` code), people are definitely using ? in that capacity. The possibility of introducing something elegant like this seems like exactly why getting in only property-access ?. would be a mistake.