On May 19, 2008, at 4:22 PM, Mark S. Miller wrote: >> Not sure if lack of replies means I was unclear, but the above >> number line >> should help highlight an awkward truth: ES3.1 is a step sideways >> (and in >> some ways backward) for "JS" as represented by Mozilla's >> implementations >> (Rhino is tracking SpiderMonkey). > > Only "backward" if "more complex" is "forward" ;)
No, I mean "backward" in this sense: Mozilla's implementations have had getters and setters since 1999 or so. Other minority share browsers were forced to reverse-engineer them because Microsoft live.com launched with user-agent testing that expected them in non- IE browsers. This is old news, and backwards -- not progress, except to catch IE up. Good for developers, for sure. Enough after nine years? Hardly. >> That's ok, standardizing post-hoc can be >> good (making up new stuff for 3.1 is less clearly good in this >> light -- more >> work needed to uphold the ES3.1 < ES4 subset relation). > > But ES4 is also sideways in this sense. There's a bunch of stuff in > Mozilla's JS1.8 that didn't make it into ES4. Namely? As noted, some pieces are prototypes that will be adjusted to match the ES4 type-based counterpart (the iteration protocol hook, e.g.). What bunch of stuff is in 1.8 that did not make it into the latest ES4 drafts? > Also, there's a tremendous amount of stuff in ES4 that was never in > a JavaScript. Except under the hood, off limits to programmers, reserved for the built-ins and the DOM. >> Since JS has evolved ahead of the standard since 1999 (and did >> before then, >> resulting in ES1 and ES2), a "JS3.1" does not make sense. Any >> ES3.1 standard >> would be folded into JS2 or possibly JS1.9 (the numbers are >> decimals, so >> 1.10, 1.11, etc. are possible too, but unlikely in my opinion). > > Glad to hear it's decimal. (Or at least binary floating point ;).) If > ES4 does become known as JS2, then, taking up the "doubling" > suggestion liorean mentioned, I suggest ES3.1 also be known as JS1.55. > Its successor could then be JS1.57, etc... I'm going to risk missing the joke and repeat that we wouldn't fold any 3.1 into a distinct *JS* version number. This is a serious point, since you proposed the unification of version number lines. Any ES3.1 that's a small upgrade to ES3 should not require a new JS version number. With "no new syntax (apart from getters and setters)", programmers should be able to object-detect new methods, not resort to duplicative whole-script versioning. Right? >> Separately from "JS3.1", my belief is that jumping from JS2 to JS4 >> is not >> helpful to "half" the audience (not truly half; who knows? could >> be by far >> the majority, since "ECMAScript", .es suffix, etc. have not caught >> on) who >> think in terms of the JS1.x evolution, however much it might help >> those >> focused on the ES numbers. > > Surely you don't mean to suggest that ES4 represents a small > evolutionary step beyond JS1.8? Wouldn't a larger increment be less > misleading? Larger than what? 0.2? The numbers are decimal tuples, so 2 - 1.8 is arbitrarily large in the second place. We don't know until we get there. The main point is to have a total order, not to "market" (or counter-market, in your case :-/) by fudging the gap to be small (or big). /be _______________________________________________ Es4-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es4-discuss
