"Pretty" function expression names

[Brendan Eich]

On May 4, 2009, at 2:00 PM, P T Withington wrote:

> On 2009-05-04, at 14:46EDT, Brendan Eich wrote:
>
>> On May 4, 2009, at 10:45 AM, P T Withington wrote:
>>
>>> Assuming we're allowed to speculate on futures here...
>>>
>>> I was thinking about improving debug-ability by adding descriptive  
>>> names to function expressions thusly,
>>>
>>> var myFun = function "my description here" (...) { ... };
>>
>> Is this better for your purposes than
>>
>> var myFun = function (...) { ... };
>> myFun.prettyName = "my description here";
>
> Just that it's shorter and easier to type.  It would be a shorthand  
> notation for setting the .name property of the function object  
> created.  I wouldn't expect the function to be referenceable by the  
> name, but I'd want Function.toString to display it (as a string  
> literal).

As Michael Haufe and Mike Wilson point out, this might leave some  
wanting to call the function by that name within its own body. I'm  
interested in why you wouldn't care about that use case -- because you  
can guarantee that myFun never varies?

An intrinsic name for toString and reflection is a fine thing, but  
people tend to expect functions with names to be callable in some  
scope. There's the rub.

I'm adding strawman and harmony pages to the wiki based on existing  
discussions, so I'll roll up the function name proposal thread and add  
this item. Thanks.

/be