Eval-invisible let bindings

[Thomas Reilly]

Don't you have to do scope chain dance for function closures anyways or did I miss something?  How is eval different from function closures?

The notion piques my curiousity though.  We here at Adobe have large AS3 code bases where it is frowned upon to use function closures b/c local variable scope chain reference leaks have caused so much consternation.  Having a way to hide variables from eval and function closures might be useful in that regard.  I'm curious what the language folks think about it.  I guarantee these types of reference leaks will be high on the list of very bad bugs written by Java programmer turned ES4 programmer using function closures w/o realizing that they are doing.  In fact I can already see the Slashdot posting "ES4 memory leak crashes University X's autonomous vehicle". 

-----Original Message-----
From: es4-discuss-bounces at mozilla.org on behalf of Igor Bukanov
Sent: Wed 12/5/2007 2:52 PM
To: es4-discuss at mozilla.org
Subject: Eval-invisible let bindings
 
Hi,

Currently ES4 allows to access from eval scripts the names introduced
by the let statements and expressions. It leads to implementation
complexity since the let bindings cannot be implemented as a pure
compilation-time feature and the runtime must be able to expose the
names for eval scripts.

Thus I suggest to consider making let bindings invisible to the eval
scripts. That is, the idea is to exclude any let-induced name from the
scope chain passed to the eval script. For example, given:

let a;
function f(b) {
    var c;
    let d;
    eval(eval_source);
}

the script from eval_source when executed would not see a and d and
would be able to access/modify only b and c.

This not only simplifies implementations, but would also give a
possibility to prevent eval-injections from discovering the internal
state of a closure as long as the closure uses let for its internal
state. Although ES4 mitigates that with restrictions on the indirect
eval, for compatibility implementations may be forced to support it.

Regards, Igor
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