why are parens required?

[ljharb]

in the "Parentheses Required for Object Literals in try Expressions" section, it says it's mirroring arrow functions - but the only reason arrows have that restriction is because without parens, it'll be a block. Can you do:

try {
  statementOne();
  statementTwo();
}

? if not, then having this restriction is unnecessary and confusing.

[arthurfiorette]

This decision was also to give an early hint that it's not the start of a try/catch block.

try { // is this a try/catch block or a try-expression of a literal object?

const [ok, err, val] = try ({ field: 'value' })

try {
  something()
} catch {}

It also follows this idea:

try {
  { field: 'value' } // label inside an empty code block
} catch {}

try {
  ({ field: 'value' }) // object literal
} catch {}

---

Try with blocks doesn't make sense in this case because blocks do not evaluate a result. The following code, If you do not generate a value, scoping problems and/or error handling are not an issue following this principle.

What should be the result value in the below code?

const result = try {
  statementOne();
  statementTwo();
}

That seems to be something that https://github.com/tc39/proposal-do-expressions aims to solve and not this proposal.

[ljharb]

I agree try with blocks doesn't make sense.

I think it's reasonable if there's a grammar ambiguity to require the parens here, but then that's the reason, not "consistency with arrows".

[arthurfiorette]

https://github.com/arthurfiorette/proposal-try-statements?tab=readme-ov-file#parenthesis-required-for-object-literals

[Arlen22]

Arrow function bodies also follow this pattern.

[ljharb]

@Arlen22 yes, that mention in the readme prompted the issue in the first place.