for-loops and declaration-like init expressions

[Mark S. Miller]

Why not accept these as for-loop initializations, so that x actually has
that function and that class as its initial value in the first iteration of
the loop? To me, that's the least surprise. Since this is a position in
which some declarations are accepted, anything there that looks like a
declaration should be a declaration.

However, I agree that banning these is much less surprising than allowing
them as expressions rather than declarations.



On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 7:58 AM, Andreas Rossberg <rossberg at google.com>
wrote:

> C-style for-loops allow declarations as init statements, but only some
> of them. Yet, the others (function and class) are actually
> syntactically legal in that position as well, because they are simply
> parsed as expressions. Consider:
>
>   let x = 0
>   for (let x = 1; ;) x  // 1
>   for (const x = 1; ;) x  // 1
>   for (function x(){}; ;) x  // 0
>   for (class x(){}; ;) x  // 0
>
> I think these latter two examples violate the principle of least
> surprise. I wonder if it wouldn't be cleaner to rule them out, by
> imposing the same lookahead restrictions on for-loop init expressions
> as there are for expression statements.
>
> The one caveat is that for function, that would actually be a breaking
> change, but is it likely to be a real world one?
>
> What do you think?
>
> /Andreas
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-- 
    Cheers,
    --MarkM
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