On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 2:49 PM, Charles Kendrick <[email protected]>wrote:
> Hello John, I'll assume you meant this as humor since the analogy has such > obvious flaws. > > Having a default strategy on Object of maintaining order obviously does not > preclude other strategies, nor does it damage the JavaScript language > itself, as locking int to 16 bits would obviously have damaged C by > requiring various new types. There is a non-zero cost of maintaining insertion order, and doing so introduces many edge cases that have been discussed. The most obvious implementation of object properties is a hash map, which does not support what you want. Aside from the technical issues, the point remains that if you write code that depends on unspecified implementation details, you should not expect that code to be portable. I think analogy with C is appropriate -- the sizes and implementation details of basic types were left unspecified, largely because specifying a particular size or representation would have made it inefficient to implement on some platforms. Sure, that meant that people had to define their own int16/int32/etc types where they cared and certainly some people wrote code assuming twos-complement or int/pointer equivalence and were surprised when the code didn't run on some other platform, but it also allowed the language to be efficiently implemented on lots of different platforms and to grow to platforms never imagined when it was first designed. -- John A. Tamplin Software Engineer (GWT), Google
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