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Comment by dreyfiz | Hacker News Reader

I've been working with coffeescript all evening and I'm loving it. My one suggestion/complaint so far is that you should follow Python more closely in refusing to accept an assignment in conditionals and insisting on comparisons only, because it eliminates a lot of bugs. E.g. if I type

  if x = y

The compiler should raise a syntax error.

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Glad you mentioned that point. The distinction between '=' and '==' in most programming languages is a personal pet peeve of mine. I think that it confuses two separate issues: labeling a value with a name, and testing the equality of values. Terrifically confusing stuff if you're coming from algebra.

So, although '=' is available to make transitioning from other languages smoother, idiomatic CoffeeScript would use ':' for assignment, both within and outside of object literals, and would use 'is' for equality. Harder to make a bug out of:

    if x is y

Thanks, I'd somehow missed "is" and "isnt" in the docs!

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