Math.TAU

[Andreas Rossberg]

On 30 June 2014 19:01, Rick Waldron <waldron.rick at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 10:27 AM, Jan Keromnes <jan at mozilla.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I'd just like to add that "joke requests" like Math.TAU that have no
>>> place in the language specification itself generate a considerable
>>> amount of overhead for those of us who keep up with the mailing list.
>>
>> I don't think asking for Math.TAU was a "joke request". It's rather a
>> request for a convenient short-cut to the value `Math.PI * 2`, of which the
>> utility and judiciousness can be debated. Sorry if I'm adding noise to this
>> less-interesting thread, but I feel the issue is being dismissed without
>> adequate consideration. I'm looking forward to Brendan championning it at
>> the next TC39 meeting, so that we can accept or dismiss it with a proper
>> review.
>>
>> My take is that having Math.TAU would end this kind of madness:
>> https://github.com/search?q=%22Math.PI*2%22&ref=searchresults&type=Code
>
> Probably not-so-coincidentally, I have almost the same search url saved in
> notes I'm preparing for discussion at the next TC39 meeting. If you remove
> the "Math." part, there are 20,288 more matches:
> https://github.com/search?q=%22PI*2%22&type=Code&ref=searchresults if you
> add spaces between PI, *, 2 there are over 3000 more matches. When the parts
> of the term are flipped around as "2*PI":
> https://github.com/search?q=%222*PI%22&type=Code&ref=searchresults (137,134
> matches for those that don't want to click). Then variations of "math.PI",
> "Math.PI" with or without spaces will yield several thousand more for each.

Come on. By that metric, we should immediately introduce a toplevel
binding `OP` as a synonym for Object.prototype, because a gazillion
lines of JS code out there contain it -- that would actually save 14
characters each, as opposed to 1 for Math.TAU. And we could probably
come up with 100 more constants and abbreviations of equivalent
utility in less than 3 minutes.

/Andreas