The wavy dot operator

What do you think about the wavy-dot operator proposal?

tc39 / proposal-wavy-dot

TC39 Wavy Dot ("~.") Proposal

proposal-wavy-dot

Pleasant Notation for promise pipelining.

• Mark S. Miller @erights, Agoric
• Michael Fig @michaelfig, Agoric
• Chip Morningstar @FUDCo, Evernote

Status

Presented to TC39 (Javascript standards committee), achieving stage 1.

Slides

Summary

This is a follow on proposal to proposal-eventual-send, providing syntactic sugar for the APIs of that proposal.

The 2011 ECMAScript strawman concurrency proposal also described a simple desugaring of an infix bang (!) operator to support promise pipelining. To avoid conflict with TypeScript, this proposal instead introduces the wavy dot (~.) syntax.

Wavy Dot

Like the (?.) of the optional chaining proposal, wavy dot (~.) is a proposed infix operator with the same precedence as dot (.). Both can be understood as adjective dot, i.e., an operation that is dot-like, but differs according to the adjective. Once the optional chaining proposal is accepted, we will add…

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To sum up the wavy-dot is a new operator ~. to use on PromiseLike object to wave the Promise to the properties of the value resolved by the Promise.
It always return a Promise how will resolve (or reject) with the result of the operation after the dot.

The available operation are

• property access, using both [] and property name
• method/function call

For example:

const asyncArray = new Promise((resolve) => resolve([1, 2, 3, 4]))

// Without the wavy-dot operator
console.log((await asyncArray)[0])  // => log: 1
console.log((await asyncArray).length)  // => log: 3
console.log((await asyncArray).join('-'))  // => log: 1-2-3

// With the wavy-dot operator
console.log(await asyncArray~.[0])  // => log: 1
console.log(await asyncArray~.length)  // => log: 3
console.log(await asyncArray~.join~.('-'))  // => log: 1-2-3

Do you think it's useful?