iteration order for Object

[Brendan Eich]

On Mar 13, 2011, at 3:58 PM, Charles Kendrick wrote:

> Brendan, Bradley and others - there's no need to search for a relatively uncommon use case for ordered maps indexed by keys - a far more common use case is enumerated data stored numerically, eg, marital status:
> 
> {
>   2: "Married",
>   1: "Single",
>   5: "Divorced"
> }

It's still a synthetic example, and real web sites/apps would be more compelling and helpful for forge consensus.


> Likewise maps from numeric primary key values to display values for the records.
> 
> So this use case comes up just about every time JavaScript is manipulating data coming from a SQL database - extremely common.

Too assert-y, sorry. I'm on your side at this point (see my reply to Claus, just sent). But evidence trumps assertions or suppositions, however plausible.


> Argument from Java??? You wound me, sir!  I would never argue from the viewpoint of such a verbose language and far prefer your JavaScript.

No offense. In my reply to Claus I said developers' eyes glaze over at LinkedHashMap. I'm not putting anyone down, on any side of this. JS's objects often "DWIM" and this is a strength as well as a weakness. It's hard to say it is purely a bug, IM(truly Humble, I hope, due to feeling developer pain these almost-16 years)O.


> So we're looking at standardizing a behavior for Object that no one has ever felt the need to implement as a reusable component.
> 
> I would argue this means we're standardizing a very rare use case.

It may be rare; it's hard to measure frequency of use (static or more imp. dynamic use). This indexed-first-in-indexed-order idea has come from implementations, I think. The implementors may be reacting to user demands too, but the optimization wins carry weight and may be dominant.

This could indeed be the wrong way to evolve the spec.

/be