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Comment by jashkenas | Hacker News Reader

To play at devil's advocate, please don't. Otherwise you should have written your comment like this:

    To me
    , consistency is important
    . All of my codebase is traditional comma postfix
    , so I'll keep using that
    ; however
    , maybe with some new projects I'll try on the comma prefix [...]

... using typography in a typographically sensible way is far more important to readability than an arbitrary "consistency" of punctation. We're humans, not computers, after all.

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Why does nobody ever mention the obvious solution? Separate var statements.

They're always correct, they copy without any editing, and the "var"s line up to show that it's a block of assignments the same as commas or whitespace.

You can only put var at the beginning of variable declarations, but there are many other places that commas are used as a separator. So that "solution" doesn't apply in general.

I think I might have explained myself poorly. I'm suggesting using separate var statements for each assignment, e.g.:

var a = 2; var b = 4; var c = { blah: "whatever" };

Leaving out a semicolon has no effect. They can be copied without any fuss. It's easy.

Problems with semi-colons usually arise in object usage. So your solution is very specific.

    x = {[
      { id: 1, data: 0 },
      { id: 2, data: 0 }
    ],
    [
      { id: 3, data: 0 },
      { id: 4, data: 0 }
    ]}

Most people also apply this to object literals. There are no var statements in this situation.

With separate var statements, you never end up with this situation:

    var foo = 1,
        bar = 2
        baz = 3

In 90% of the cases the code will run the same whether or not there is a comma on line 2, but in the other 10% you will get burned in odd ways now that `baz` is a global variable.

JS Lint is your friend in this case. It will log that

* There's a missing semicolon on line 2

* There's a missing semicolon on line 3

* baz was being used before it was defined.

That's just in a global context. When it's in a function you get a little more:

* the baz line is indented too far - because it's being interpreted as a new statement.

Sure, you could eyeball your code looking for this. Or just use an automated tool that'd do it for you

Separate vars is what I prefer to do, but JSLint actually recommends that you change multiple var statements to a single var with variables separated by commas (and with a semicolon at the end of course!). (And also all var declarations at the top of the function...).

This. I admire code that reads like english. Leading commas are a terrible idea in my humble opinion.

It's so ugly to me that the whole idea seems like it could be a troll.

I use leading commas in any list that is not one liner in C++. This way the code looks pretty, and that is way more important that code that reads like english. :) (I shudder from dread every time I look at applescript...)

Even in your example you were consistent, so was I. Inconsistency would be

  To me, consistency is important
  . All of my codebase is traditional comma postfix
  , so I'll keep using that; however
  , maybe [...]

Which is more confusing than either of our consistent examples. Unless I misunderstood your point.

    And let me play the advocatus Dei
    , because that actually looks quite readable
    .

Though, more seriously, using English (a natural language) to try to make an appeal to absurdity about the format style of a formal language, is plain absurd.

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