var bob = route(“obj.foo.bar.bob”); // returns null if nonexistent

It’s not as syntactically beautiful as “bob = obj.foo.bar.bob” would be, but is that bad? It’s easy enough to understand; it expresses a different intent than a native evaluation anyway (since it’s parameter is indeterminate); and since javascript is interpreted at run-time anyway, there’s no downside in terms of syntax checking as there might be in a compiled language. Though since the whole point here is that we don’t know if the operand exists, syntax checking doesn’t make much sense anyway. In that way I kind of think it’s more correct to keep it as a string in your code.