coffeescript leading dots behavior change between minor versions

leading-dot-behavior.md

Take this snippet, borrowed from the coffeescript changelog:

$ 'body'
.click (e) ->
  $ '.box'
  .fadeIn 'fast'
  .addClass '.active'
.css 'background', 'white'

When compiled with anything older than 1.7.0, it will produce something like the following:

// Generated by CoffeeScript 1.6.3
(function() {
  $('body'.click(function(e) {
    return $('.box'.fadeIn('fast'.addClass('.active')));
  }).css('background', 'white'));

}).call(this);

However, in 1.7.0, they changed how leading dots are compiled:

// Generated by CoffeeScript 1.7.1
(function() {
  $('body').click(function(e) {
    return $('.box').fadeIn('fast').addClass('.active');
  }).css('background', 'white');

}).call(this);

Now, I like this change, because at least to me, it makes it more obvious what the code is actually trying to do.

However, effectively changing how a newline works in a minor version bump is not something I approve of. Sure, the coffeescript is not following semver, because they believe it's a lie.

This, combined with the section on versions on npmjs.org, did probably end up confusing a bunch of people, and at least gave me doubts as to what parts of the coffeescript API you can actually trust.