Allow *.js input to --join

[alexandertrefz]

With --join we now got a nice tool to concat files for bigger projects but to allow coffeescript to integrate better into legacy codebases i would suggest to allow painless joining of *.js files.
What do you think about this?

[michaelficarra]

And how would you specify which files are JS and which are CS? I think you're looking for cat, it does what you want.

[alexandertrefz]

I would specify the files by extension *.js and *.coffee
I am not sure, but if a want a specific order, like

foo.coffee
bar.js
baz.coffee

how would i do that with cat?

To clarify this issue, i already have written my own tool that concats scripts and "resolves" *.js files with putting around the contents, but since we have--joinnow, i think it would be easy to make this simpler, so that not everybody needs to write his own little tool just for embedding *.js. But if this is possible withcat`, i am fine with that.

[michaelficarra]

@atrefz: I don't think we should treat files with different extensions differently. Just do this:

coffee -co compiled.js cs.coffee && cat someFile.js compiled.js someOtherFile.js > combined.js

how would i do that with cat?

You do know that cat stands for concatenate, right? That's it's job.

[alexandertrefz]

@michaelficarra Yes, a quick google search revealed that even to a guy without any unix knowledge(=me). Maybe i was not clear enough, how could i achieve a specific order where i have a *.coffee, followed by a *.js and then again another *.coffee while it is important to maintain that order? The only way that i see with cat would be to create a compiled.js for all files before the *.js and a compiled.js for all files after, but that gets messy pretty quickly and also duplicates all the CS-Helpers.

[michaelficarra]

how could i achieve a specific order where i have a *.coffee, followed by a *.js and then again another *.coffee

Easy:

coffee -c a.coffee && coffee -c c.coffee && cat a.js b.js c.js > combined.js

To omit the duplicated headers, I believe you have to interact with the compiler programmatically for now.

edit: see #1820 for the duplicated helpers pull request, still open

[lydell]

This could be closed now, because of #3477, right?