On Mar 9, 2009, at 2:40 PM, Juriy Zaytsev wrote:
It is sometimes unfortunate that Function's Identifier can not be
set from a string value, without resorting to `eval`. Descriptive
Identifier's make debugging easier. ...
I think this is actually an important use case - debugging. There is
a similar problem with folks who build frameworks that eval() code -
it's difficult, in debuggers like FireBug and Web Inspector, to
disambiguate these from the places such things show up in lists, since
the artifacts tend to have the same name like "Program" "eval'd
source" or whatever.
FireBug added some new behavior to display the first few bytes of the
eval()'d source, to help disambiguate. I've now abused this so that I
put a comment in front of eval()'d code that has an identifying mark.
Hopefully, the following picture shows what I'm doing:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pmuellr/3256189331/
A nicer approach would be to define some kind of JavaDoc-like comment
tag that would be used for the name. This could be used to support
both eval() and Function().
Another approach, for Function, might be for debuggers to support a
notion of "debugToString()", which would get invoked in lieu of
toString() for the debugger's own purposes.
In all the approaches, nothing actually needs to get defined in terms
of the language, just in terms of additional things debuggers could
support, that developers could take advantage of. If one of the
primary use cases for naming is debug, this is probably a better
approach to go down - extend the debuggers - rather than deal with it
at a language level.
Patrick Mueller - http://muellerware.org/
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