Question

a snippet from a sample:

class Animal
  constructor: (@name) ->

the documentation says that @name is a syntactic sugar for this.name. Where does it say that the above function also performs assignment? how? I can see from the generated code that it does, I am just trying to understand the language. why does it perform assignment?

thanks
konstantin

Answer 1

http://arcturo.github.com/library/coffeescript/03_classes.html

In fact, CoffeeScript provides a shorthand for the common pattern of setting instance
properties. By prefixing argument’s with @, CoffeeScript will automatically set the arguments as instance properties in the constructor.

Basically, calling the argument @name means “use this argument to set the name property of the new Animal instance”.