>> There's no solution to this problem other than reserving at least >> one name, and we can't do that compatibly. We could reserve __ES4__ >> in version-selected ES4 mode, but that seems unnecessary. > > I guess this is considered a small penalty to pay in exchange for > adding the magical instance scope to methods (which O-O programmers > seem to expect these days). Something we'd regret more if we had > multi-methods, perhaps...
We should take this problem seriously. OO programmers expect dynamic dispatch, but not dynamic scope! In OO languages with static type systems, you can tell when a variable reference is being dynamically dispatched because of the types. In traditional JavaScript, you can tell dynamic dispatch is happening because the `this.' prefix is always required. But now with classes, since we don't have a static type system to know whether a dynamically inserted property might shadow a lexical reference, dynamic scope has slipped in. Dynamic scope is very bad. Another solution is to require the `this.' prefix even inside classes, just as they are required everywhere else, so you can distinguish between a dynamically referenced variable and a lexically referenced variable. I think Python (a more-or-less lexically scoped but dynamically typed OO language) requires this? (Pythonistas please correct me if I'm wrong.) If five characters are really too hard to write, there's always the possibility of the `.foo' shorthand syntax. Dave _______________________________________________ Es4-discuss mailing list Es4-discuss@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es4-discuss
