Now we have the safe navigation operator &.. But this cannot be used with syntax sugar form of the methods [] and []=, which are more frequent than their ordinary forms of method call. For example, when a can be either an array or nil, we can do:
a &.[](3)
a &.[]= 2, :foo
but we cannot do:
a &.[3]
a &.[2] = :foo
It would be nice if we can extend the use of &. to cover syntactic sugar as above.
It seems to me that a "safe subscript operator" should simply add a & between the receiver and the subscript operator (making a[3] safe would mean changing it to a&[3]), just like safe navigation adds a & between the receiver and the method invocation operator (a.foo => a&.foo).
Unfortunately, & is also a method name and is defined for several corelib classes (bitwise AND for Fixnum, set intersection for Array, boolean AND for FalseClass/NilClass/TrueClass). So if variable a above were an array, a&[3] would return the set intersection of a and [3]. It is true that a&.[](3) accomplishes the desired outcome, but this involves using the subscript operator as a method name -- which obscures semantic intent.
Is it possible to define a "safe subscript operator" with simple and unique syntax?
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