Separating a Hash type from Object

[Alex Russell]

On Monday 30 April 2007 11:59 am, Brad Fults wrote:
> As has been previously noted [1] and should be general knowledge, the
> confusion and collision between Object-as-hash and
> Object-as-inherited-from is sometimes painful in ES3.
>
> I looked through the latest ES4 spec and proposals [2] but didn't see
> anything about changing the way hashes are handled. Are there any
> plans to derive a Hash type from Object which would handle what are
> now object literals (as hash literals)? If not, can there be?

There has been a proposal regarding this:

	http://developer.mozilla.org/es4/proposals/enumerability.html

ISTM that exposing ES3's internal [DontEnum] to user-set properties 
fixes the issue without removing the (useful) flexibility of the 
object/hash duality.

> This would solve many of the contemporary problems with Object (like
> extending Object.prototype to include methods like .keys(),
> .values(), etc.). I'm interested to hear others' thoughts on this.

Idiomatic ES3 code uses the object/hash duality to good effect. It's one 
of the things I miss most when returning to a language without it 
(e.g., Python). 

Regards

-- 
Alex Russell
alex at sitepen.com     A99F 8785 F491 D5FD 04D7 ACD9 4158 FFDF 2894 6876
alex at dojotoolkit.org BE03 E88D EABB 2116 CC49 8259 CF78 E242 59C3 9723
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