See the default operator proposal for a ?? binary connective with a ??= assignment operator form, useful for ensuring a variable has a default value instead of undefined.

This proposal augments the default operator by adding syntax to avoid accessing a missing property, specifically ?. for getting and setting a property from a reference base that might be undefined or null:

// given obj an object that may or may not have a hints property:
let greedy = obj.hints?.greedy;

In the case where the property to the left is missing or has a value that cannot be coerced to an object, evaluating the expression results in undefined rather than a TypeError being thrown.

This operator is inspired by CoffeeScript’s existential operator accessor variant (see http://coffeescript.org/#operators under “The Existential Operator”), Ruby’s "andand" gem, and Groovy’s Safe Navigation operator.

We add two productions:

• MemberExpression : MemberExpression QuestionDot IdentifierName
• CallExpression : CallExpression QuestionDot IdentifierName

to the syntactic grammar.

As a numeric literal may begin with the decimal point, conditional expressions such as condition?.1415926538:elsePart are valid JS and have been since the beginning. Therefore we need a lexical lookahead restriction when tokenizing ?.:

QuestionDot ::
    ?. [lookahead ∉ DecimalDigit]

We extend 11.2.1, Property Accessors. The production MemberExpression : MemberExpression QuestionDot IdentifierName is evaluated as follows:

1. Let baseReference be the result of evaluating MemberExpression.
2. If Type(baseReference) is Reference and IsUnresolvableReference(baseReference) is true, then return undefined.
3. Let baseValue be GetValue(baseReference).
4. If baseValue is null or undefined, then return undefined.
5. Let propertyName be the result of evaluating IdentifierName.
6. If the syntactic production that is being evaluated is contained in strict mode code, let strict be true, else let strict be false.
7. Return a value of type Reference whose base value is baseValue and whose referenced name is propertyName, and whose strict mode flag is strict.

The production CallExpression : CallExpression QuestionDot IdentifierName is evaluated in exactly the same manner, except that the contained CallExpression is evaluated in step 1.

— Brendan Eich 2012/06/18 03:40