Compact “with-ish” statement for CoffeeScript

I’ve been playing with CoffeeScript (CS) lately, and I really like it. JavaScript (JS) is full of annoyances that make coding more tedious and error-prone that it needs to be. CofeeScript does a good job of fixing many of those annoyances.

CS doesn’t provide anything like JS’s with block. That makes sense, because with in JS is completely insane and broken. But sometimes you want to be able to say “given this object, call a bunch of methods on it”. You can of course write something like this:

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foo = new Foo
foo.bar(42)
foo.baz(84, "x")

Or in CS:

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foo = new Foo
foo.bar 42
foo.baz 84, "x"

If you want a more Dee Ess Ell style, you can reach for this in JS:

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foo = new Foo
with (foo) {
    bar(42)
    baz(84, "x")
}

In typical JS fashion, with is a nightmare. Douglas Crockford has a good write up on why it’s broken.

The other alternative in JS is to use method chaining:

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foo = new Foo
foo
    .bar(42)
    .baz(84, "x")

Unfortunately, because of CS’s parsing rules, method chaining is kind of fugly, requiring explicit parentheses. Also, method chaining requires explicit cooperation from the methods being called.

So I came up with this alternative in CS:

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foo = new Foo
(->
  @bar 42
  @baz 84, "x"
).call foo

This creates an anonymous function and then invokes the Function.call method on it. The call method takes its first argument and makes it the method’s invocant, so inside the function this is now equal to that argument (foo in the example above).

I think this syntax could make for a nice alternative to method chaining when you want to call methods on the same object repeatedly. The only thing I don’t like is that the invocant ends up at the end of the block. I really wish I could write something like this:

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foo = new Foo
using foo ->
  @bar 42
  @baz 84, "x"

I could get pretty close by defining my own using function:

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using = (invocant, method) -> method.call invocant

foo = new Foo
using foo, ->
  @bar 42
  @baz 84, "x"

But then I need to have that function around everywhere I want to use it, which is a hassle. For now, I think I’ll try using the (anon).call version and see how I like it.

Comments

Aristotle Pagaltzis, on 2011-12-11 14:59, said:
The cure is far worse than the disease in this case, if you ask me.

Dave Rolsky, on 2011-12-11 15:07, said:
@Aristotle: Care to elaborate? I think the anon function version is fairly clear, and if it was an idiom you used repeatedly, it’d be easy enough to read.

Think of Perl’s map or grep. They’re weird at first, and I’ve even heard some folks say that we shouldn’t use them because they’re too confusing to noobs, but experienced Perl programmers will find that map or grep is much easier to read and write for many uses.

Aristotle Pagaltzis, on 2011-12-12 01:23, said:
It’s not about understandability but about æsthetics. The punctuation pile-up looks awful and nothing much lines up – a visual jumble. With longer blocks that would be less of an issue, but those are inadvisable for another reason: the reader is forced to mentally keep the delimitation open while reading. (To use your example, think of how readability suffers as you stretch a “map” block across a few lines, and then even more so as you stretch it further. C.f. The Awful German Language.)

The version with “using” OTOH is entirely tolerable.