3 ms·

Alright, this is bugging me. Why are you using colons for assignment?

• jrockway 17y ago
  I am not the author, but I assume because it's nice-looking, and JavaScript already uses it for assignment (inconsistently). Consider: var foo = 42; { foo: 42 } Why make the two concepts different? Also, it's "binding", not assignment.
  • jashkenas 17y ago
    a: 1 b: 2 obj: { a: 1 b: 2 } Quite right, and internally, both kinds of assignment compile into a CoffeeScript AssignNode. The latter is just tagged as occurring within an object literal. Having the commas be optional in multiline objects also helps make both kinds of assignment look identical. (And I'm calling it assignment because saying "binding" in JavaScript usually means that you're binding a function to a "this" context object)
    • nir 17y ago
      Any chance you'll allow equal sign as well as colon? For all of us coders conditioned by years of programming to automatically use "="... Looks beautiful, in any case.
      • jashkenas 17y ago
        Sure, why not. They can be interchangeable. It's in the latest commit, and will go out with the next release.
        • nir 17y ago
          Cool, thanks!
  • j_baker 17y ago
    Erm... no, it's assignment. At least according to the documentation: http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/#assignment http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/#assignment At any rate, I was just curious. To me, x = 1 looks more intuitive than: x: 1 But that's just my personal preference.