Poll: =undefined ?

Does anyone actually like =undefined? Or should I just not display it if the result of the command you executed is undefined?

Pros:

• No special cases - it's obvious what was returned, even if it was nothing :)
  
• It's slightly easier to control Espruino remotely, as you know that after executing a command, it'll return =
  
  

Cons:

• Gets in the way/looks ugly
  
  
  
  

Ok, I lied. It's not a poll because I can't do those - but please post up what you think.

It's fine, and allows do distinguish between the empty string and undefined. I believe it's in the language, just live with it.

I think to someone who has not come from a JS background at first it did catch me off guard as I was thinking hmmm has something gone wrong here. However after reading up a bit on the site and realising why it was happening I'm quite comfortable with the output.

As you say it can "look messy" but I'm not overly worried about that. I assume this question has come up a few times when doing demos/needed explanation?

To be fair, with these changes, empty string would return ="" but undefined would return nothing.

Would you have a problem if it disappeared? Some people seem to get quite annoyed by it - I wonder if anyone would get annoyed if it wasn't there.

Is it a case of the message "undefined" is annoying and they would prefer something like "OK" which most of the AT command driven controllers use?

I think they'd prefer:

>print("Hello")
Hello
>1+2
=3

Rather than:

>print("Hello")
Hello
=undefined
>1+2
=3

The issue has come up in a few e-mails I've got. I know, once you get used to it, it is fine. However maybe it's something that you shouldn't have to get used to!

Ahhh.. yes remove!

Yes, remove.

Remove.

Although this is standard in JS consoles (ex, in web browsers), I don't see much benefit to it being shown on the Espruino, since you know it did something, since it's showing the > - I think you can go ahead and remove it.

Personally I like the fact that it specifically says that the function returned undefined.

In the print("Hello") example above I would be a bit confused about the "Hello" on the console - was is printed? Returned as a string? Or some object? Especially that this behaviour would be different than Node.js or JS console in the browser.

Hmm - it's a very good point about it being like node.js... Any thoughts? Seems a shame to be different.

Interestingly, node outputs 'undefined' in grey text, so it fades into the background a bit more. I guess we could do that...