On Feb 19, 2008, at 6:39 PM, Graydon Hoare wrote: > Finally there is a category I left off the above elaboration, mostly > because it is under-developed in the RI: control mechanisms. There are > dependencies between tail calls, generators and stack inspection, > and I > can't say I fully understand the dependencies nor the impact they have > on the rest of the implementation.
This reminds me of something that Maciej already questioned in his initial response to the language overview: if the control inspector is optional, it's either useless on the web because not supported by all major browsers, or else de-facto non-optional: mandatory due to support in one or two top-market-share browsers. Therefore it should not be included as an optional part out of ES4. We already agreed not to make it mandatory for the sake of small-device implementations. I like the control inspector proposal (http://wiki.ecmascript.org/ doku.php?id=proposals:stack_inspection), but Maciej's argument seems decisive to me. Those of us likely to implement it in the near term could work on developing an ad-hoc spec from the proposal, to be considered for inclusion in a later edition. Generators have an implementation plan in the RI based on delimited continuations in SML, and we seem to have reached consensus recently on proper tail calls. To lighten the load and focus on these two high- value control abstractions proposed for ES4, could we think about deferring control inspector? This is discussion fodder, I'm not yet filing a trac ticket. /be _______________________________________________ Es4-discuss mailing list Es4-discuss@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es4-discuss
