And the worst part of it is, nearly all the confusing/ambiguous/different compilation examples given rely on the undocumented rules CoffeeScript uses for parsing. It's amazing that, still, CoffeeScript's entire documentation is basically a "getting started" guide, and there is simply no reference documentation.
Compare with Go, where you can easily read the whole spec and keep the whole language in your head: http://golang.org/ref/spec
The "The Smalltalk Language" section of the last ANSI Smalltalk draft is a more reasonable 28 pages.
I won't say it's bad, as it is nice to work with when you're writing it, and I do quite like it. But I could never recommend it to someone who didn't have a good knowledge of javascript already.
- Implicit is better than explicit
- There is more than one way to do it
To that end, the docs on Coffeescript.org are the reference documentation (as they are the only official documents to reference) and they've suited me just fine. I get the sense that you're looking for a document in the style of ECMA-262, rather than one in the style of MDN.
describe 'Calculator', ->
it 'can add two positive numbers', ->
result = calculator.add 2, 3
assert result is 5
it 'can handle negative number addition', ->
result = calculator.add -10, 5
assert result is -5
Python doesn't limit lambdas to a single line, but to a single expression. That is a rather different constraint.