On Dec 8, 2009, at 12:52 PM, Mike Samuel wrote:

2009/12/8 Brendan Eich <[email protected]>:
On Dec 8, 2009, at 11:51 AM, Erik Corry wrote:

for (let i in arraylike) {
  i |= 0;

If this pattern catches on then we could optimize for it without
changing the language.

Yeah, but some day there will be only "new" versions in which i is numeric for arraylikes and that becomes pointless. On that fine day programmers can stop writing the ugly extra statement. That's worth something too, even as a
new loop construct "could be nicer".

Do we want nicer with high migration tax and greater total language
complexity (new loop construct), or nicer with lower tax (reformed for-in under new opt-in version), or not-so-nice with perpetual type-fixup kludge

Well, we have "use strict," and then this would give us "use integer,"
so all that leaves would be an excuse to shoehorn "use vmsish" into
the language :)

I remember VMS. Not as good as TOPS-20 :-P.

Seriously, opt-in versioning will not be via too many "use mumble" pragmas, rather whole-edition selection a la RFC 4329. The "use strict" idea is good but we don't want endless feature knobs (we = everyone, TC39, developers, implementors).

More, while in-language version selection may yet happen, I don't see how it helps with new syntax. You'll get syntax errors from old browsers without any way to handle them (no fallback or alt content for <script>).

More controllable (for authors) is something like the sketch here:

http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=proposals:versioning

linked from

http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:versioning

Your thoughts and edits are welcome on this last page.

/be

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