[RFC] Shorter alternative representation for `of'

[chris hermansen]

Hello again,

On Sat, Jan 17, 2026 at 5:38 PM Mohammad-Reza Nabipoor <mnabipoor@gnu.org>
wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 18, 2026 at 02:34:07AM +0100, Mohammad-Reza Nabipoor wrote:
> > or even better:
> >
> >     foo of bar of baz           foo./bar./baz
> >     baz fo bar fo foo           baz\.bar\.foo
> >
>
>
> Or even:
>
>     foo of bar of baz           foo./bar./baz
>     baz fo bar fo foo           baz/.bar/.foo
>
> Because if `./' is similar to `of', `/.' is similar to `fo'!
>

While I like of and fo (having suggested fo myself) I really don't like ./
and /. - I guess I could live with .\ and /. or \. and ./ but why not just
.?

By the way and for what it's worth, in Groovy we have the ? usable for a
short-circuit to deal with nulls, that is:

a?.b?.c?.d will never fail - if a is null, then it returns null, otherwise
it looks at a.b; if that's null, it returns null, otherwise it looks at
a.b.c and so on.

I use this all the time when I'm doing Groovy.


-- 
Chris Hermansen · clhermansen "at" gmail "dot" com

C'est ma façon de parler.
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