An array destructing specification choice

[Erik Arvidsson]

On Sat, Nov 5, 2011 at 11:55, Brendan Eich <brendan at mozilla.com> wrote:
> The issue with ... in an array destructuring pattern is different from the case without. We have a choice, as you say. It's not obvious that doing a "get" of 'length' on the RHS (once per ...) is the right answer. It's plausible in my view that ... captures all indexed properties (index as defined by ECMA-262).

// A
var [x, y, z] = {0: 0, 1: 1, 2: 2, length: 0};
`$x $y $z`  // '0 1 2'

// B
var [x, ...xs] = {0: 0, 1: 1, 2: 2, length: 2};
`$x [$xs]`  // '0 [1]'

I think A is clear. It is just syntactic sugar for x = $tmp[0] etc. No
need to check length. In this case the lhs drives this decision.

B IMO must check the length or it would have to iterate over all
own(?) properties in rhs instead of just iterating over startIndex to
length - 1. It is also more consistent with other operations that work
on array like objects (slice, apply, splice...).

In Traceur we do the following:

var x, xs;
(function($0) {
  x = $0[0];
  xs = Array.prototype.slice.call($0, 1);
  return $0;
}).call(this, {
  0: 0,
  1: 1,
  2: 2,
  length: 2
});

I believe this is simpler to understand than to say that all indexed
properties are used.

-- 
erik