an operator for ignoring any exceptions

[Frederick Stark]

Having recently inherited a codebase which silently consumes errors in many places (using try/catch, Promises that don't reject - just stall, and promise.catch noops), I can imagine these getting used terribly.

At least with the current operators, there's an expectation in the syntax that you will handle the error, and you have to make the conscious decision to ignore the error. Introducing an operator that does it for you implies to novice programmers that it's an okay thing to do.

The amount of extra code required to ignore the errors is not very onerous, and if you need it frequently, you can always put it in a wrapper function.

--
Fred Stark
m: 0468 828 420 | e: coagmano at gmail.com
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I acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, who are the traditional owners of the land on which I work and live.

On 2 Aug 2017, 2:30 PM +1000, kai zhu <kaizhu256 at gmail.com>, wrote:
> -1
> in my real-world experience, JSON.parse and nodejs fs.readFileSync are the only 2 common use-cases that would benefit from this.  its more practical to use helper-functions for those 2 use-cases rather than change the javascript language yet again (besides, returning an empty string is commonly more useful for me than returning undefined for failed fs.readFileSync).
> this is also a likely footgun that would get abused by novice programmers for many inappropriate use-cases.
> > On Aug 2, 2017 11:59 AM, "Sheng TIAN" <llltgd at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Is there any proposal for an one unary operator for ignoring any exceptions.
> > >
> > > (I have not search out any related threads. But it is useful IMO, so I'm wondering if this had been discussed.)
> > >
> > > For example, we may introduce an unary operator called `try` which
> > >
> > > 1. calculate the operand first
> > > 2. if it not throw, return as is
> > > 3. otherwise return undefined
> > >
> > > This operator may be used when exceptions should always be ignored.
> > >
> > > Example:
> > >
> > >     let resp;
> > >     try {
> > >       resp = JSON.parse(xhr.responseText);
> > >     } catch (_ignore) { /* do nothing here */ }
> > >
> > > may be simplified to:
> > >
> > >     const resp = try JSON.parse(xhr.responseText);
> > >
> > > Another Example:
> > >
> > >     var age = user && user.age;
> > >
> > > to:
> > >
> > >     var age = try user.age;
> > >
> > > (Note, in such case, if operand is start with curly braces "{", it must be wrapped in parentheses "()".)
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > es-discuss mailing list
> > > es-discuss at mozilla.org
> > > https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
> > >
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