Separating a Hash type from Object

[P T Withington]

I agree with Neil.  A sugarless dictionary is better than no  
dictionary at all.

On 2007-05-05, at 17:40 EDT, Neil Mix wrote:

> Has this thread dropped again?  That's too bad.  It seems like we
> keep going in this circle:
>
> 1) we need a base Dictionary class
> 2) in order to be successful, it needs "good UI" and perhaps weak refs
> 3) there's no syntax proposed for this
> 4) it's awfully late for any big changes anyway
> 5) but we need a Dictionary class
>
> I take issue with #2.  It's my impression that the veteran JS
> developers on this list have all stated a strong desire for key-safe
> storage, and I believe that they would all agree that a Dictionary
> without syntactic sugar and weak refs is better than nothing at all.
> Do any JS hackers here disagree?
>
> What is the danger in specifying a hobbled Dictionary class for now,
> with the hope that better syntactical goodness and weak refs can be
> added in a later version?
>
> On May 2, 2007, at 3:13 PM, Brendan Eich wrote:
>
>> On May 2, 2007, at 12:56 PM, P T Withington wrote:
>>
>>> Have you considered Hash being a new native type with its own rules
>>> for ToPrimitive, ToString, and ToObject?
>>
>> We have considered a native Dictionary class, as I reported recently.
>> It lacked sugar; it didn't support weak refs. We stepped back and
>> deferred it.
>>
>> Because Dictioinary required users to call has, get and set methods,
>> no changes to avoid bad shadowing of toString and valueOf arose with
>> the proposal.
>>
>> /be
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