I miss pseudo :symbols from Imba1

[madmaniak]

Description

:symbol # => 'symbol'

It was really small feature but I loved to use it. Why to drop it?

Is this something you're interested in working on?

Yes

[familyfriendlymikey]

Are you talking about these? https://imba.io/docs/grammar#identifiers-symbol-identifiers

[haikyuu]

@familyfriendlymikey strings that don't contain spaces can bw written (in ruby and imba1) like this :mikey, which would compile to "mikey"
I know about this because I struggled with a piece of imba1 in the past and had to ask Sindre about it.
Rubyists are quite familiar with this, but not people coming from js land

[madmaniak]

Let them write "mikey" and let rubyists write :mikey. No?

[haikyuu]

@madmaniak I agree. I would use it too (now that I know what it is 😆)

One question though: what's the compiled output of this?

let c = a :b

1. let c = {a:b}
2. let c = a("b")

I think that's the main reason it was dropped and it would be too confusing to have a: b and a :b be so different

[madmaniak]

Surely option 2 - you write : with b so it is applied to b. If you write together with a it applies to a. I've never seen someone would like to write like this - knowing that it normally compiles to option 1.

[haikyuu]

Agree let's do it 💯 , and syntax highlighting helps with this (although @familyfriendlymikey doesn't use syntax highlighting)

It comes down to Sindre's opinion on it 😄

[haikyuu]

There is another way, which I find a better fit for imba (Borrowed from lisp):

let name = 'Sindre

It starts with the quote so it's closer to a string and it behaves the same as rubys :name.

[madmaniak]

Awesome.