Awesome

This proposal lives somewhere else now

It's been merged with the accepted proposal led by Sam Goto, which you can find here. Contribute there!

Motivation

Large numeric literals are difficult for the human eye to parse quickly, especially when there are long digit repetitions. This impairs both the ability to get the correct value / order of magnitude…

1000000000   // Is this a billion? a hundred millions? Ten millions?
101475938.38 // what scale is this? what power of 10?

…but also fails to convey some use-case information, such as fixed-point arithmetic using integers. For instance, financial computations often work in 4- to 6-digit fixed-point arithmetics, but even storing amounts as cents is not immediately obvious without separators in literals:

const FEE = 12300
// is this 12,300? Or 123, because it's in cents?

const AMOUNT = 1234500
// is this 1,234,500? Or cents, hence 12,345? Or financial, 4-fixed 123.45?

Using underscores (_, U+005F) as separators helps improve readability for numeric literals, both integers and floating-point (and in JS, it's all floating-point anyway):

1_000_000_000      # Ah, so a billion
101_475_938.38     # And this is hundreds of millions

FEE = 123_00       # $123 (12300 cents, apparently)
FEE = 12_300       # $12,300 (woah, that fee!)
AMOUNT = 12345_00  # 12,345 (1234500 cents, apparently)
AMOUNT = 123_4500  # 123.45 (4-fixed financial)
AMOUNT = 1_234_500 # 1,234,500

Also, this works on the fractional and exponent parts, too:

0.000_001 # 1 millionth
1e10_000  # 1^10000 -- granted, far less useful / in-range…

This would make a very valuable addition to literal syntax.

Prior art

Underscores are allowed anywhere in integer and floating-point literals in the following languages (at least):

• Ruby
• Python 3.6+
• Java 7+
• Rust
• Swift

So yes, C++, C# and Go don't have it (yet), but that still seems like JS is missing out here.

Syntax changes

(Changes expressed over ES2016's spec text.)

The only section of lexical grammar that seems impacted would be numeric literals, specifically digit definitions:

11.8.3 Numeric Literals

DecimalDigit:: one of
  0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 _

BinaryDigit:: one of
  0 1 _

OctalDigit:: one of
  0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 _

HexDigit:: one of
  0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f A B C D E F _

Cross-cutting concerns

Most number-testing and number-conversion APIs and procedural steps are likely affected, usually automatically by transitivity of abstract operations used in their algorithms, in order to maintain consistency.

ToNumber, ToXx and the Number constructor

The semantics described in 7.1.3.1. ToNumber Applied to the String Type already rely on digit definitions from 11.8.3, so the algorithm there doesn't seem to need any adjustment.

Because the Number constructor (as described in 20.1.1.1), various abstract operations (such as ToInteger, ToIntXx and ToUintXx) and most other "standard lib" operations rely on ToNumber semantics, they also do not seem to need adjustment.

Global object functions isFinite and isNaN

Both rely on ToNumber semantics (18.2.2 and 18.2.3), so they adjust automatically.

Global object functions parseInt and parseFloat

parseFloat relies on StrDecimalLiteral syntax, which in turns relies on DecimalDigit, so we're covered.

parseInt uses conventional radix prefixes, which we don't need to change, then delegates to ToInt32, which as seen above relies on our adjusted syntax definitions already.

Methods of the Number constructor

All detection methods (isXx methods) operate on actual numbers, such as number literals, so they do not introduce extra conversion / parsing rules. The parseFloat and parseInt methods are just convenience aliases over their homonyms in the global object.