JavaScript: The Good Parts

Chapter 10. Beautiful Features

Thus, expecting thy reply, I profane my lips on thy foot, my eyes on thy picture, and my heart on thy every part. Thine, in the dearest design of industry. . .

—William Shakespeare, Love's Labor's Lost

I was invited last year to contribute a chapter to Andy Oram's and Greg Wilson's Beautiful Code (O'Reilly), an anthology on the theme of beauty as expressed in computer programs. I wanted to write my chapter in JavaScript. I wanted to use it to present something abstract, powerful, and useful to show that the language was up to it. And I wanted to avoid the browser and other venues in which JavaScript is typecast. I wanted to show something respectable with some heft to it.

I immediately thought of Vaughn Pratt's Top Down Operator Precedence parser, which I use in JSLint (see Appendix C). Parsing is an important topic in computing. The ability to write a compiler for a language in itself is still a test for the completeness of a language.

I wanted to include all of the code for a parser in JavaScript that parses JavaScript. But my chapter was just one of 30 or 40, so I felt constrained in the number of pages I could consume. A further complication was that most of my readers would have no experience with JavaScript, so I also would have to introduce the language and its peculiarities.

So, I decided to subset the language. That way, I wouldn't have to parse the whole language, and I wouldn't have to describe the whole language. I called the subset Simplified ...