On 10.07.2011 20:36, Brendan Eich wrote:
On Jul 10, 2011, at 3:06 AM, Dmitry A. Soshnikov wrote:
Array.from is a good addition, I guess any good framework has it.
Though, `Array.of` in contrast doesn't bring much of a sugar. Compare these two
apples-to-apples:
Array.of( "things", "that", "aren't", "currently", "an", "array" )
vs.
["things", "that", "aren't", "currently", "an", "array"]
what's the goal in first case to write this useless "Array.of" prefix and exactly the
same to manually enumerate the items? In fact, the second one is more suggared than the first one
(the first one is: "added useless prefix Array.of and brackets around items are replaced with
call parens").
Note that JS's pattern for alternative constructors is String.fromCharCode, Array.from,
etc. -- "class methods".
Yes, that's OK with `Array.from`. That's said, many libs have such a
util. Some langs, e.g. Ruby just expose such a possibility as instance
method. That is, an object there can just call its inherited method
`to_a` to convert `self` to array value. Though, `Array.from(...)` seems
better for JS for the same reason as `Object.defineProperty` is placed
on `Object` instead of the `Object.prototype`.
So the goal of Array.of is to provide a constructor that, unlike Array, does
not have that insane special case for Array(42), which presets length (and
hints to implementations to preallocate) but leaves holes in [0, length).
I still don't see how it will help in manual enumeration of the same
items which may be directly passed to brackets of array initialiser. We
enumerate (by hands) items here, right? -- Array.of(1, 2, 3). And we
enumerate items here (by hands also) -- [1, 2, 3]. The difference is
that the second case syntactically more elegant and sugared and also
doesn't require non-needed function activation with allocating
call-stack frame, etc. Still `Array.of` seems just useless for me.
Correct me if I'm wrong. But I'm all in for the `Array.from`.
Dmitry.
_______________________________________________
es-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
