Separating a Hash type from Object

[Andrew Dupont]

On Apr 30, 2007, at 2:20 PM, Alex Russell wrote:

> 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 fixes for-in loops, more or less. I'd also like to see a Hash  
class with a custom iterator::get that yields only instance  
properties. Relying only on propertyIsEnumerable is not enough, I  
think, because naive script-writers won't necessarily know to mark  
their extensions to Object so as to keep their chocolate out of your  
peanut butter.

However, it doesn't fix the lack of key safety.

var foo = {};
foo + ""; //-> "[object Object]"

foo.toString = "bar";
foo + ""; //-> Error: Can't convert foo to primitive type

This bothers me.  The original "toString" property can still be  
accessed with an intrinsic:call, but that doesn't help with the  
automatic string coercion in the example above.

I think this has been discussed before on this ML, but nobody has  
come up with an easy answer here.  Ideally, speaking from a narrow  
perspective, I'd like to be able to distinguish dot notation from  
bracket notation...

foo["toString"]; //-> "bar";
foo.toString;     //-> function() {}

... but I fear that's too large a can of worms to open.

Cheers,
Andrew