What does "as if by the expression" mean in ES3?

[Mark S. Miller]

On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 5:36 PM, Brendan Eich <brendan at mozilla.org> wrote:
> On Jun 19, 2008, at 5:14 PM, Mark S. Miller wrote:
>
>> For example, in ES3
>>
>> 11.1.4 Array Initializer
>> ...
>> 1. Create a new array as if by the expression new Array().
>> ...
>>
>> The phrase "as if by the expression" followed by a literal snippet of
>> code occurs repeatedly in ES3.
>
> Did you see my message of 16 June, 10:50am?
>
> https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es4-discuss/2008-June/003020.html

I did see that message, but it doesn't bear on lexical shadowing. Your
example there replaces the global binding rather than shadowing it.
Did I miss something?



>> I know that ES4 prevents assignment to
>> the various global variable names used by such code, but what about
>> shadowing lexical variable definitions?
>
>
> The wiki page, again, is:
>
> http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=clarification:which_prototype

Yup, that's what I missed. Thanks. That page nowhere says "lexical",
"nest", or "shadow" so it hadn't occurred to me that it bore on this
issue.



> ES4 has gone with memoized original values *and* immutable type bindings,
> not name lookup with shadowing hazards, for a long time now.

Good. That's what I was hoping you'd say ;).


>> FF 2.0.0.14 on squarefree does
>> seem to obey the literal reading of the ES3 spec -- that shadowing
>> affects array and object literals:
>>
>> (function foo(){
>>  function Array(){return Date;}
>>  function Object(){return window;}
>>  return new window.Array([1,2],{bar:3});
>> })();
>> function Date() { [native code] },[object Window]
>
> Yes, SpiderMonkey followed ES3, as did other implementations, for many
> years. Try Firefox 3, it's out now and it uses the memoized original value.
> :-)

Wonderful!


>> Safari literals are not affected by such shadowing definitions. Which
>> behavior does ES4 consider correct?
>
> Lars wrote a spec and iterated on it in this list. Here's the third and
> (AFAIK) stable draft:
>
> https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es4-discuss/2008-April/002668.html
>
> It too says
>
> Unlike the case in ES3, the program can't shadow the binding for Object in
> order to invoke an alternative object constructor for object initializers.
>
> NOTE   Though ES4 is incompatible with ES3 here, most real-world
> implementations of ES3 do not respect shadowing binding for Object when
> evaluating object initializers, and the incompatibility is of no
> consequence. See [8].
>
> I know there's a lot of material to go through, between ES3, ES4 drafts, and
> so on -- but it seems like we've been over this topic a lot, and recently
> too. In particular in my reply to you of three days ago :-/.


Thanks for your patience. And thanks especially for arriving at the
right decision on this matter. I agree that the resulting
incompatibilities in this case are unlikely to be of any consequence.



-- 
    Cheers,
    --MarkM