CoffeeScript is a little middleman language that compiles into JavaScript written by Jeremy Ashkenas, who is responsible for the Ruby Processing project.

It aims to bring elements of Python and Ruby’s cleaner syntax to JavaScript. CoffeeScript uses Pyhton’s significant whitespace instead of curly braces and does not require semi-colons for terminating lines. Right off the bat, the existence operator (?) struck me as quite slick. Checking if a variable is defined in JavaScript has always been a sore spot.

In JavaScript:

var solipsism;
if ((typeof mind !== "undefined" && mind !== null) && !(typeof world !== "undefined" && world !== null)) {
    solipsism = true;
}

The same statement, in CoffeeScript:

solipsism: true if mind? and not world?

Note that a colon is used for assignment, as in JSON.

Other features include argument splats, Ruby ranges, more powerful switch statements, simplified lexical scoping, almost everything as an expression, and more.

It’s written in Ruby and uses racc for the parser.

More complex examples can be found here.

Courtesy of Wikipedia, entities allowed to register .ca domains:

• a Canadian citizen of the age of majority,
• a permanent resident of Canada,
• a legally recognized Canadian organization,
• an Inuit, First Nation, Métis or other people indigenous to Canada,
• an Indian Band as defined in the Indian Act of Canada,
• a foreign resident of Canada that holds a registered - Canadian trademark,
• An executor, administrator or other legal representative of a person or organization that meets the requirements,
• a division of the government,
• Queen Elizabeth II in her capacity as head of state of Canada