Request For Comments: Forward Slash as Separator

Posted 7 May 2019 by Natalie Weizenbaum

Early on in Sass’s history, the decision was made to use / as a division operator, since that was (and is) by far the most common representation across programming languages. The / character was used in very few plain CSS properties, and for those it was an optional shorthand. So Sass defined a set of heuristics that defined when / would be rendered as a literal slash versus treated as an operator.

For a long time, these heuristics worked pretty well. In recent years, however, new additions to CSS such as CSS Grid and CSS Color Level 4 have been using / as a separator increasingly often. Using the same character for both division and slash-separation is becoming more and more annoying to users, and will likely eventually become untenable.

As such, we’re planning to redefine / to be only a separator. Rather than creating an unquoted string (as it currently does when at least one operand isn’t a number), it will create a list with a new slash separator. For example, 1 / 2 / 3 will be a three-element slash-separated list. Division will instead be written as a function, divide() (or math.div() in the new module system).

Rollout permalinkRollout

This is a major breaking change to existing Sass semantics, so we’ll roll it out in a three-stage process:

  1. The first stage won’t introduce any breaking changes. It will:

    • Add a divide() function which will work exactly like the / operator does today, except that it will produce deprecation warnings for any non-number arguments.
    • Add slash-separated lists to Sass’s object models, without a literal syntax for creating them. That will come later, since it would otherwise be a breaking change.
    • Add a slash-list() function that will create slash-separated lists.
    • Produce deprecation warnings for all / operations that are interpreted as division.

  2. The second stage will be a breaking change. It will:

    • Make / exclusively a list separator.
    • Make divide() throw errors for non-number arguments.
    • Deprecate the slash-list() function, since it will now be redundant.

  3. The third stage will just remove the slash-list() function. This is not a priority, and will be delayed until the next major version release.

Giving Feedback permalinkGiving Feedback

If you want more details on exactly how the proposed behavior will work, head over to the Sass language repo and read the full proposal. You can skip the Background and Summary sections, since they’re included above. Be aware, though, that it’s written to be a specification; it’s a great for figuring out how exactly an edge case should work, but it’s not as conversational as the sections quoted above.

If you have any issues with the proposal as written, or if it doesn’t cover a use-case that’s important to you, please bring that up in the Sass language issue tracker. We’ll be leaving it open for discussion for at least two weeks before we mark the proposal as “accepted” and move on to the implementation phase.

Please be aware, though, that while we welcome community feedback, the design of Sass is ultimately in the hands of the language team. We’ll absolutely consider the perspectives and use-cases of users who speak up, but it’s also our job to consider all the users who are new to Sass or even to CSS and who don’t yet know to read blogs or comment on issue trackers. Remember that our careful decision-making made Sass what it is today, and have patience with us if we don’t make the decisions you would have!