Day 2 meeting notes

[Brendan Eich]

On Jul 30, 2010, at 2:43 PM, felix wrote:

>> Of course this does not say what the syntax for a meta-programmable
>> iteration construct should be, but laziness suggests "all" is not
>> precisely on target.
> 
> so why not make it "for each"?  for-each iterates over a stream, and in the case of arrays the stream is the array values.

Reasons not to add each:

1. Avoid another contextual keyword (few implemented E4X).
2. Avoid confusion over what "each" means.
3. Even assuming we added "each" based on E4X, the objection that |for each (x in y)| loops would need to cope with y being a proxy that customizes value-iteration exists.

Point 3 is Waldemar's objection w.r.t. |for-in| becoming customizable (as it is in JS1.7 and Python). It applies equally to |for-each-in| given the E4X precedent of non-proxy object on right of 'in' being enumerated (iterated over its enumerable keys), and its enumerable keys' values returned.

One can bikeshed for days on all sorts of vague and wrongly general words such as "each". Instead, focusing on the right side of "in", providing an explicit iterator-factory call, seems strictly better.

/be