New private names proposal

[Allen Wirfs-Brock]

On the wiki, I've posted a new strawman Private Name proposal http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:private_names . It replaces Dave and Sam's original Names strawman and was developed in consultation with them. This is a significant revision to the original proposal but builds upon some of the same base ideas. 

In reading this strawman it's important to understand that its concept of "private" is quite different from what you may be use to from C++ or Java.   In those languages "private" is an attribute of a member (field or method) of an class.  It means that the member is only accessible to other members of the same class (ignoring what can be done via reflection).  This model is not a particularly good match to the JavaScript object model where the structure of an object is much more dynamic and method functions can be dynamically associated or disassociated with an object and shared by many different kinds of objects.

In this proposal, "private" is an attribute of a property name, rather than of an actual property.  Any code that has access to a "private name" can use that name to create or access a property of any object. It is accessibility to the name that is controlled rather than accessibility to the property.  This seems to fit more naturally with JavaScript's dynamic object construction patterns and without really changing the fundamental JavaScript object model it enables JavaScript programmers to create a number of different information hiding abstractions.

Please read the proposal and let's start the discussion.

Allen



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