prototype for operator proposal for review

[Brendan Eich]

On May 18, 2011, at 6:46 AM, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt wrote:

> On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 2:59 AM, Luke Hoban <lukeh at microsoft.com> wrote:
>>>> That sort of pattern certainly can be repeated if push comes to shove.  But I believe doing so is far inferior to dedicated, first-class syntactical support to make the semantics absolutely unambiguous and un-confusable with anything else.
>> 
>> This makes sense.  I just want to make sure that the fundamental capability to subclass built-in objects is available via libraries for text/javascript, with the new syntax offering the more performant option for text/harmony.
> 
> Perhaps I'm missing something, but <| seems like something that could
> be provided to 'text/javascript' just as easily as
> 'text/the-next-javascript'.  Unlike using |module| as a keyword, or
> changing the scope rules or |typeof null|, no working
> 'text/javascript' program uses <| at the moment.

Couple of small points, one I already laid on Luke in a private reply:

1. text/javascript is unregistered HTML4 noise. RFC4329 has application/javascript and application/ecmascript with version parameter reserved.

2. Developers want new syntax not to choke old browsers. I've been there in 1996-2001 with ES2 and ES3. So using a new type or version value hides the new syntax from old browsers. You have to do something for the old browsers, of course, either server-side or client-side. See

http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:versioning

and its links. I'm going to improve this page shortly.

/be