isPropertyEnumerable is going to stay broken?

[Brendan Eich]

On Sep 8, 2007, at 10:06 PM, Garrett Smith wrote:

> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57048
>
> In this bug, dated 2000, Brendan and David agreed that
> isPropertyEnumerable should check the prototype chain.

That was a long time ago, and while David Flanagan carries a lot of  
weight with many folks, he was not on ECMA TC39 TG1, and no one on  
the group changed the spec.

A lot of water under the bridge since then.

> It should not backwards compatibility,

Famous last words. :-)

We try to spider the web (Alexa top 1000 and the like) looking for  
counterexamples to such claims, and if we fail to find any, or  
better, we find instances of confusion where the incompatible fix is  
assumed (i.e., the JS author thought the spec worked the way we want  
to change it to work), then we have some confidence, but not much  
more, in favor of making an incompatible change. In general. In this  
case, no one has done such a scan. I'll see if I can get one started.

> but such functionality in the
> language seems necessary. How to check enumerable attribute, including
> the prototype chain?

Either reflect the __proto__ (read-only, please) property as some  
implementations do, or hardcode the prototype structure and code your  
propertyIsEnumerable tests accordingly.

/be