Brendan Eich wrote:
On Dec 3, 2008, at 1:04 PM, Sam Ruby wrote:
I saw the meeting minutes, and got a debrief from Allen yesterday.
I'm still unclear on how to proceed with Decimal, even if the new
target is Harmony.
Waldemar's issues were raised and responded to prior to Kona:
https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2008-November/008074.html
Did this address Waldemar's other message?
https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2008-September/007631.html
The "no user visible cohorts" addressed that particular concern.
I also don't see a reply to David-Sarah Hopwood's message:
https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2008-November/008078.html
Given that the spec text has been removed, the way I would like to
proceed is to first come to an agreement on the semantics we desire, and
for that I would like to solicit comments on the output produced by the
implementation I produced.
While I agree that Decimal wrappers are useless; but I think that
consistency argues that they need to be there (in fact, I was talked
into putting them there); again I refer back to the output produced and
solicit comments.
What are we left with relative to the the following output from the
code that I wrote?
http://intertwingly.net/stories/2008/09/20/estest.html
Looks like we may need Waldemar to comment or elaborate on his last post
(first link above).
Relative to that output, I've heard two issues.
The first was "no user visible cohorts". The issue is Waldemar's
insistence that ES is irretrievably broken if array lookup for
x[1.10m] respects the trailing zero. IIRC, Brendan's position was a
more pragmatic one, namely that "small" integers (like, say, up to
10**20th) are the only values for which toString must avoid both
exponential notation and trailing zeros, other values shouldn't get in
the way of "doing the right thing". That would have been fine, but
unfortunately he couldn't make the meeting (something I definitely
understand). Mike and I weren't then, and still aren't happy about
conceding to Waldemar's position on this one, but at Redmond we did
with the understanding that with that concession, Decimal was "in".
This Redmond-meeting result did sound like a breakthrough in any event.
Was it memorialized with spec changes?
There were spec changes that went in as a result of the Redmond meeting,
yes. At least one was identified before the Kona meeting by Waldemar
(and fessed up to by me) as having been botched by myself (and => or).
The second was the duplication between "Math.min" and "Decimal.min".
I was operating under the "if it ain't broken, don't fix it"
guidelines. To date, Math.min *always* returns a Number, never an
Object. Waldemar apparently feels that people will call the wrong
function. To me, this is a "you say N-EEE-THER, I say N-EYE-THER"
issue. If the consensus is that Math.min should be changed and
Decimal.min should be removed, that's a pretty quick fix.
This doesn't seem like a big problem, by itself.
Agreed, and in any case, one that I would eagerly adopt.
So now the question is: where are we now?
The two general kinds of problems from the Kona meeting were:
1. Spec bugs, not just typos but material ones that couldn't be fixed by
that meeting, which was the deadline for major additions to ES3.1 not
already in the spec.
For the moment, I would like to split that list into two categories:
areas where there isn't yet agreement within the committee on how to
proceed, and the best way I know how to make progress on that is to come
to agreement on the behavior desired, hence my suggestion that we look
at concrete test cases; and a list of places where I erred in my
converting my understanding into prose.
No matter how we proceed, the first list needs to be captured and
addressed eventually anyway.
2. Future-proofing arguments including: do we need Decimal wrappers for
decimal primitives. I know we've been over this before, but it still is
an open issue in TC39.
That does sound like the type of issue that I would like to see us
identify and work to resolve. Two questions come to mind: (1) can
anybody identify a specific expression which behaves differently that
one would desire, and (2) if we've been over this before, what does it
take to actually close this issue this time for good?
I'd appreciate Waldemar's comments; and those of other TC39ers too, of
course.
/be
- Sam Ruby
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