September TC39 meeting notes

[Waldemar Horwat]

Igor Bukanov wrote:
> 2008/10/3 Waldemar Horwat <waldemar at google.com>:
>> An open issue is whether const violations should be compile or run-time errors.  Clearly some of them are undecidable and can only be reported at run-time, but what about the clear-cut cases?
>>
>> {
>>  a = x;
>>  const x = 2;
>> }
> 
> It would be nice if a compilation error is reported for
> 
>   const x = x + 1;
> 
> This way ECMAScript can beat C++ where
> 
> const int i = i + 1;
> 
> is syntactically valid and the language does not require any
> diagnostic from the implementation.
> 
> Regards, Igor

It definitely won't be as bad as C++'s behavior here (gcc accepts some of these without warning and simply leaves i uninitialized in the sequel of the code).

  const x = x + 1;

will be at least a run-time error.  Whether it should be a compile-time error is open for discussion.

    Waldemar