On Aug 18, 2008, at 1:44 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hi Ihab, I'm going to respond pointedly to only part of your post.
Please take this as a constructive riposte, intended to get at a high-
order design bit that should not be assumed set or clear: whether
modules should be like ES1-3's weak notion of program units or should
be something new: purely lexical scope containers.
By that argument, I would like to propose that a module and a
"compilation unit" (or ES3 <Program>) be merged into one concept. This
has the useful side effect that the loading of a top-level program
(whatever that is, and wherever it comes from) can be re-explained
simply in terms of the loading of a module.
This reasoning seems backwards. If modules are added in a first-class
way to the JS, they present an opportunity to avoid the global objec
utterly, and enforce true lexical scope. Since the Program
nonterminal from ES1-3 is evaluated using a shared global object in
browser embeddings, it cannot be restated using this lexical-scope-
only idea of a module.
Why make so future-hostile a decision to enshrine today's Program
semantics with respect to the global object? The ever-extensible
global object topic has been bruted about as a security problem, and
I agree it's a problem for enforcing various properties important for
modularity and security.
Dave Herman points out that JS is evolving away from its REPL roots,
just as Scheme did, so the ever-extensible top level is increasingly
hopeless. One (compatible) way around this is to extend the language
with new forms that introduce purely lexical scope.
Thus the global object, programs as source evaluated using the global
object as the single object on the scope chain, and even all the
hated dynamic scope forms (with, eval that can introduce bindings in
its caller's scope) can be left in the outside-the-module penalty
box. Compatibility requires this, in any foreseeable ES version.
Inside a module, introduced by some kind of explicit syntax, only
lexical scope is allowed. No global properties are available. Typos
in unqualified identifier expressions can be caught at compile time.
Cats and dogs live together in peace ;-).
Comments?
/be
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