On Feb 12, 2009, at 10:23 PM, Peter Michaux wrote:
On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 10:16 PM, Brendan Eich <[email protected]>
wrote:
On Feb 12, 2009, at 9:41 PM, Peter Michaux wrote:
Not at all and it is unfortunate it came across that way. It is at
the
whole chain of events which is long: "for the ECMAScript committee
to
standardize methodMissing, for browsers to implement it and for old
browsers to disappear".
Standardizing a target bytecode or even AST encoding would take no
less
time, almost certainly more.
We should talk about methodMissing for Harmony.
Great but to be clear, methodMissing was just an example of a feature
some desire. I could have used "classes", "continuations", "threads",
etc all of which people have tried to add to ES.
Let's not go in circles or generalize until there's nothing to talk
about. I've argued against full continuatons, also against threads
(see my blog). Any particular responses?
Generators inspired by Python are in JS1.7 and 1.8 (generator
expressions), and proposed for harmony. One issue already raised:
should Harmony depart from Python and JS1.7 by requiring some new
keyword instead of 'function', say:
generator odds() {
for (let i = 1; ; i += 2)
yield i;
}
I'm still inclined to follow Python and re-use 'function' as it reused
'def', for reasons given in the PEPs. People do not get confused by
the change yield in a function makes to the meaning of the function
(that it becomes a factory for generator-iterators). At least not in
our experience with JS1.7+, or AFAIK with Python.
Some kind of classes as sugar, probably zero inheritance, private
variables, public methods, probably public static methods are on the
boards for Harmony.
A methodMissing hook came up as a late request for 3.1. Allen
responded that it didn't fit in the schedule and suggested any such
feature should handle property accesses as well as method calls:
https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2008-August/006925.html
Igor pointed out how call and apply won't work with a __noSuchMethod__
mechanism tied to invocation:
https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2008-August/006929.html
You were perfectly clear in lamenting the time to get things
standardized and then implemented, and then to wait for old browsers
to die off (I share your lament), but there's no point in complaining
about this general problem, or laundry-listing good and bad (IMHO :-P)
features that may or may not have been implemented or proposed, to
justify code generators. If we're to improve the standard language for
either hand-coders or compilers, let's get down to brass tacks.
/be
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