Question

I am watching this great video by Jeremy on CoffeeScript. He explains that one of the ideals of CoffeeScript is to have “everything be an expression”.

How close to this ideal has CoffeeScript got? What are the CoffeeScript non-expressions?

Answer 1

There are a few things that are not converted into expressions in coffeescript, as explained in the documentation:

There are a handful of statements in JavaScript that can’t be meaningfully converted into expressions, namely break, continue, and return. If you make use of them within a block of code, CoffeeScript won’t try to perform the conversion.

Everything else is wrapped in function closures and handled by coffeescript, which means you can do cool stuff like

alert(
  try
    nonexistent / undefined
  catch error
    "And the error is ... #{error}"
)