[Harmony Proxies] Proposal: Property fixing

[Mark S. Miller]

On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 4:20 PM, Cameron McCormack <cam at mcc.id.au> wrote:

> Tom Van Cutsem:
> > invariants that are enforced:
> …
> > - unconfigurable [[Class]] (Object or Function, respectively)
>
> Web IDL requires [[Class]] to take on values other than these two, for
> example it should be "HTMLDivElement" for an HTMLDivElement object.  I
> have a feeling that the web requires this, as opposed to just having a
> custom toString function.
>
>
> http://google.com/codesearch?q=Object.prototype.toString.call+lang:javascript
> brings up some libraries that use Object.prototype.toString on DOM
> objects.
>
> Is it palatable to have proxies control [[Class]] or is there another
> way we can help proxies over this hurdle?
>

Tom and I actually proposed this at an earlier EcmaScript meeting, for
precisely this reason. Discussion revealed difficulties that led to
increasing complexity, due to the use of [[Class]] as an internal nominal
type test within the specification machinery. For example, all the Date
methods implicitly test that their this.[[Class]] is "Date":

    15.9.5:
    > a TypeError exception is thrown if the this value is not an
    > object for which the value of the [[Class]] internal property is
"Date"

Do we want a proxy to be able to pass this test? If so, do we want a proxy
to be able to provide the internal properties that the Date methods access?
At the time at least, the proposal for [[Class]] control went down in flames
as such questions accumulated. In light of Allen's recent thinking about
meta-objects and reflection, we can certainly revisit this, but please not
at the May meeting ;).


> --
> Cameron McCormack ≝ http://mcc.id.au/
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-- 
    Cheers,
    --MarkM
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