Assigning to ReadOnly properties

[Mark Miller]

On Nov 12, 2007 9:05 AM, Brendan Eich <brendan at mozilla.org> wrote:
> [..], but the idea would
> be to enable throwing of a ReadOnlyError on assignment to a ReadOnly
> property. Comments?

Hi Brendan,

I'm glad to hear that this possibility is in scope. In the Caja spec, we write:

  \item[Silent errors.] In JavaScript, various operations, such as setting a
  ReadOnly property, fail silently rather than throwing an error. Program
  logic then proceeds along normal control flow paths premised on the
  assumption that these operations succeeded, leading to inconsistency. To
  program defensively in the face of this hazard, every assignment would be
  followed by a ``\emph{did it really happen?}'' test. This would render
  programs unreadable and unmaintainable. Where practical, Caja deviates from
  standard JavaScript by throwing an exception rather than failing silently.

For defensive consistency (as defined in my thesis) to be practical, I
believe this change is necessary. I also believe that defensive
consistency (or some close relative) is necessary for secure
programming. Caja goes to a lot of trouble to achieve this while
running on an ES3 platform. If ES4 made this change, it might make
Caja's future life easier.

-- 
Text by me above is hereby placed in the public domain

    Cheers,
    --MarkM