Simple objects

You have no doubt spent a lot of time working with objects in JavaScript. They are the most versatile data structure in the language, and JavaScript encourages heavy use of them. CoffeeScript keeps all that great support for objects, and adds a few helpful features for dealing with them.

Declaring an object looks very familiar. Let's record a few biographical details:

author = { name: "Ian", age: 26 }

We can still access object properties like we do in JavaScript:

author.name
author["age"]
author.favoriteLanguage = "CoffeeScript"

Just like CoffeeScript arrays, if we declare the object properties on different lines, we can optionally omit the commas.

authorsBicycle = {
  color: "black"
  fenders: true
  gears: 24
}

That's not all! We can also omit the curly braces. This is possible on both the single-line and multi-line versions.

author = name: "Ian", age: 26, favoriteLanguage: "CoffeeScript"
authorsBicycle =
  color: "black"
  fenders: true
  gears: 24

This even works with nested objects...