make $location getters easily observable

[IgorMinar]

if we removed this references from $location getters, we could write scope.$watch($location.url, ..) instead of scope.$watch(function() { return $location.url() }, ...)

this should be a trivial change

[colincasey]

since the $location functions determine whether the getter or setter is being called by checking if the first argument is undefined, wouldn't registering scope.$watch($location.url, ...) pass the scope as the first argument in the digest loop and effectively set that as the value?

[petebacondarwin]

@colincasey - you are right.

For the "properties" that are "Getter-Setter": path, hash, search, url, this would not work, unless we provided separate "read-only" versions of them.
The ones that are read-only would work: absUrl, protocol, host, port.

Probably makes this idea much less trivial

[colincasey]

@petebacondarwin, definitely less trivial. i played around with this for awhile yesterday and was able to get the function bindings for all the location properties to work with scope.$watch($location.url, ...) but the setters really complicate the picture.

the only other way i could think to make this work would be to also check the first argument to see if it was a Scope object and call the getter in that case but that seems awkward and unwise.

[petebacondarwin]

I wonder if it is any real benefit to spend time on this. It is only syntactic sugar and also $watch will be moving towards using Object.observe in the long run which could make this redundant.