Separating a Hash type from Object

[P T Withington]

On 2007-05-02, at 02:40 EDT, Brendan Eich wrote:
  [...]
> Indeed, #. etc. is just a thought experiment.

I do think there needs to be a primitive Hash type.  Otherwise we  
doom users to trying to invent their own and hitting all the various  
pitfalls that have been enumerated on this thread.

The safety issue is that methods are visible as properties of an  
instance.  Putting the methods in a special namespace seems kludgey  
to me.  What is the benefit of methods being properties of an  
instance?  What if they were not?

Another thought experiment:

What if `foo.bar(...)` was syntactic sugar for `bar[typeof foo].apply 
(foo, ...)`.  Oh, wait, that's not quite right.  Guess I have to  
invent generic functions.  Hm.