Why are the parens needed at all in the first case? The question mark should attach to the AO call, not the field value.

The question mark should attach to the AO call, not the field value.

... Why? That's not the obvious-to-me parse of that expression. (Compare e.g. ! a().b in JS.)

There are two examples in the spec where the operand of ? is a field-extraction, both in InnerModuleEvaluation:

• return ? _module_.[[EvaluationError]]
• return ? _requiredModule_.[[EvaluationError]]

In each case, the intended parse is
return ? (_foo_.[[EvaluationError]])
not
return (? _foo_).[[EvaluationError]]

I think I can fix this easily enough, but to be honest the extra binding seems like a good thing from a readability point of view, so I'm probably not going to prioritize it right away.

@bakkot because i don’t expect completion records to be stored in record fields, but i do expect them to be the result of an AO call. I don’t think JS has a comparison because completion records are so weird a concept.

Completion records can be stored in record fields. They're just a value like any other.

Sure, that's just not something we ever do, afaik, hence my expectation.

I already gave an example where we do that: the [[EvaluationError]] field of a Cyclic Module Record is a throw completion or ~empty~.

Ah, fair enough. My expectation still holds, and using parens should ofc work, and i agree the separate alias is cleaner.