return when desugaring to closures

[Brendan Eich]

On Oct 13, 2008, at 4:54 PM, Waldemar Horwat wrote:

> I am talking about let bindings.  Lars brought up at that meeting.   
> I did not find the use cases particularly convincing, but the dead  
> zone is compelling.  There are four ways to do this:
> A1. Lexical dead zone.  References textually prior to a definition  
> in the same block are an error.
> A2. Lexical window.  References textually prior to a definition in  
> the same block go to outer scope.
> B1. Temporal dead zone.  References temporally prior to a definition  
> in the same block are an error.
> B2. Temporal window.  References temporally prior to a definition in  
> the same block go to outer scope.
>
> Let's take a look at an example:
>
> let x = "outer";
> function g() {return "outer"}
>
> {
>  g();
>  function f() { ... x ... g ... g() ... }
>  f();
>  var t = some_runtime_type;
>  const x:t = "inner";
>  function g() { ... x ... }
>  g();
>  f();
> }
>
> B2 is bad because then the x inside g would sometimes refer to  
> "outer" and sometimes to "inner".
>
> A1 and A2 introduce extra complexity but doesn't solve the problem.   
> You'd need to come up with a value for x to use in the very first  
> call to g().  Furthermore, for A2 whether the window occurred or not  
> would also depend on whether something was a function or not; users  
> would be surprised that x shows through the window inside f but g  
> doesn't.
>
> That leaves B1, which matches the semantic model (we need to avoid  
> referencing variables before we know their types and before we know  
> the values of constants).

Agreed, this is compelling, it shows the insufficiency of lexical order.

I missed this somehow (where are those meeting minutes? Still being  
vetted by TC39?). Thanks for restating it.

/be