On Sep 15, 2008, at 10:21 PM, Jon Zeppieri wrote: > Don't even get me started on activation 'objects'...
Nor me. > Mark, didn't you propose eliminating that language from the spec? > (Yup. https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2008-April/ > 006062.html) > I'm guessing that's not actually happening for ES3.1. May be too big a change for 3.1, on the agenda for Harmony. As Dave Herman has argued, mapping scopes onto objects is a primal sin in the ES specs. Recasting where possible via lexical bindings, putting the global object, with, and eval into penalty boxes, both in real terms for programmers (e.g. "use lexical scope"), and in the spec by making the bad cases entail exceptional work, seems more than worth the trouble. It's "easy" to keep hacking around with objects, maybe trying to freeze some bindings, but doing so is a temporary evil at best, or foolish child's-play at worst (if done out of some misguided uber- minimalism, to avoid reforming the spec language to use lexical scope normatively). Guy Steele was editor during much of the ES1 period, and he helped greatly, but compatibility concerns and time-to-"market" prevented us from taking his advice on this point. I wish we had, though. /be _______________________________________________ Es-discuss mailing list Es-discuss@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
