Concise functions, Nonexistent lambdas, Explicit tail calls
Brendan Eich
brendan at mozilla.com
Tue Dec 9 23:41:44 PST 2008
On Dec 9, 2008, at 8:59 PM, Jon Zeppieri wrote:
> Since there is no updateExpr to worry about, that isn't a problem.
> The real problem with for/in is that the set of property names can
> change under you as the loop executes.
You're guaranteed not to see ids deleted after the loop started. The
spec leaves undefined whether you see added names. Real
implementations that I know do not show added names.
Enumeration order is also unspecified. The big issue among
implementors I talk to is whether only Arrays, or all objects with
indexed properties, use index order rather than insertion order. I'm
increasingly in favor of index order, which almost always matches
insertion order. Where there's no agreement among browsers (e.g., for
an array with named and indexed properties), we could hope to
standardize on a specific total order.
For JS1.7+ and (I hope) Harmony, for-in constructs are built on a
Pythonic iteration protocol, likewise for-each-in (just using a
different iterator). Everything, arrays, DOM nodelists, objects
representing various kinds of collections, could have an __iterator__
hook (name TBD, __iter__ is the Python name). Calling it gets you the
iterator for that object (iterators return themselves). An iterator
has only a .next() method and throws StopIteration (a singleton
exception object) to stop iteration.
Generators (functions that yield, as in Python) are factories for
iterators that resume the function at the entry point or after the
last yield when .next() is called. It's actually easier to model for-
in and for-each-in as generator-based, and then specify generators
using primitives. The ES4 RI used delimited continuations in SML-NJ,
thanks to Dave Herman.
This was detailed in a couple of ways for ES4, most successfully by
Jason Orendorff (with a patch to the RI), but the fundamental design
doesn't depend on ES4-isms.
I'd like to take a fresh run at strawman:iteration over the holidays.
Thoughts welcome,
/be
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