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Classes, Inheritance, and Super
JavaScript’s prototypal inheritance has always been a bit of a brain-bender, with a whole family tree of libraries that provide a cleaner syntax for classical inheritance on top of JavaScript’s prototypes: Base2, Prototype.js, JS.Class, etc. The libraries provide syntactic sugar, but the built-in inheritance would be completely usable if it weren’t for a couple of small exceptions: it’s awkward to call super (the prototype object’s implementation of the current function), and it’s awkward to correctly set the prototype chain.
Instead of repetitively attaching functions to a prototype, CoffeeScript provides a basic class structure that allows you to name your class, set the superclass, assign prototypal properties, and define the constructor, in a single assignable expression.
Constructor functions are named, to better support helpful stack traces. In the first class in the example below, this.constructor.name is "Animal".
codeFor('classes', true)
If structuring your prototypes classically isn’t your cup of tea, CoffeeScript provides a couple of lower-level conveniences. The extends operator helps with proper prototype setup, and can be used to create an inheritance chain between any pair of constructor functions; :: gives you quick access to an object’s prototype; and super() is converted into a call against the immediate ancestor’s method of the same name.
codeFor('prototypes', '"one_two".dasherize()')
Finally, class definitions are blocks of executable code, which make for interesting metaprogramming possibilities. Because in the context of a class definition, this is the class object itself (the constructor function), you can assign static properties by using
@property: value, and call functions defined in parent classes: @attr 'title', type: 'text'