LiveScript

LiveScript is a functional language that compiles to JavaScript. It was created by Jeremy Ashkenas—the creator of CoffeeScript—along with Satoshi Muramaki, George Zahariev, and many others.^[2] Notably, LiveScript was briefly the name of JavaScript in 1990s.^[3]

Syntax

LiveScript is an indirect descendant of and partly compatible with CoffeeScript.^[4] The following is a fully Coffeescript-compatible hello-world example of LiveScript syntax.

hello = ->
  console.log 'hello, world!'

While calling a function can be done with empty parens, hello(), LiveScript treats the exclamation mark as a single-character shorthand for function calls with zero arguments: hello!

LiveScript introduces a number of other incompatible idioms:

Name mangling

At compile time, the LiveScript parser implicitly converts kebab case (dashed variables and function names) to camelcase.

hello-world = ->
  console.log 'Hello, World!'

With this definition, both the following calls are valid. However, calling using the same dashed syntax is recommended.

hello-world!
helloWorld!

This does not preclude developers from using camelcase explicitly or using snakecase. Dashed naming is however, common in idiomatic LiveScript^[5]

Pipes

Like a number of other functional programming languages such as F# and Elixir, LiveScript supports the pipe operator, |> which passes the result of the expression on the left of the operator as an argument to the expression on the right of it. Note that in F# the argument passed is the last argument, while in Elixir it is the first.

"hello!" |> capitalize |> console.log
# > Hello!

Operators as functions

When parenthesized, operators such as not or + can be included in pipelines or called as if they were functions.

111 |> (+) 222
# > 333

(+) 1 2
# > 3

References

External links

• LiveScript website