Hoisting behaviour of 'const' and 'let'
David-Sarah Hopwood
david.hopwood at industrial-designers.co.uk
Sun Oct 12 07:07:16 PDT 2008
David-Sarah Hopwood wrote:
> Yuh-Ruey Chen wrote:
>> David-Sarah Hopwood wrote:
>>> The reason for making 'const' hoist to the top of the enclosing block,
>>> AFAIR, was consistency with function declarations. However, there are
>>> good reasons why 'const'/'let' and function declarations should be
>>> treated differently:
>>>
>>> <snip>
>> I think you're forgetting about |var| hoisting.
>
> I'm not forgetting, but I don't think it's relevant, because hoisting was
> exactly the problem with 'var' that we're trying to fix. That is,
>
> - the hoisting behaviour of 'let' *must* differ from 'var', otherwise
> what is the point of 'let'?
> - the hoisting behaviour of 'const' should be the same as 'let',
> because:
> * it doesn't need to hoist for backward compatibility, unlike 'var';
> * the argument about guaranteed initialization is even more important
> for 'const' than it is for 'let';
> * obviously we do not want four different hoisting behaviours
> (for 'var', 'function', 'const' and 'let'). [Note that ES3
> already has two hoisting behaviours, for 'var' and 'function',
> so what I've proposed would only be adding one more.]
* if 'const' has the same hoisting behaviour as 'let', then we
don't need a separate 'let const'.
--
David-Sarah Hopwood
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