Sep 27 meeting notes

[Brendan Eich]

On Sep 30, 2011, at 9:09 PM, Oliver Hunt wrote:

>> 1. Oliver and others do want x and y to be in scope somehow. They can't be via the |this| parameter object on the scope chain, though. That's dynamic scope (the prototype is extensible, or *a* prototype, possibly Object.prototype, is). But the desire to avoid this. prefixing is natural and predictable for people coming from C++, Java, etc. Should we consider supporting this expectation somehow, rather than steering people away from it with less natural syntax?
> 
> My recent proposals have not been placing member fields in scope (all my examples use this.blah), they have merely been providing a declarative syntax to define the shape of an instance of the object. 

Ok, noted -- sorry, I meant to write "Gavin" not "Oliver" ;-). The idea of instance variables being in scope does keep coming up.


> I also see the constructor(this.x, ..) stuff as syntactic sugar that is unrelated to the actual class semantics -- that syntax could be added at a later date and would not impact the behaviour of classes,

Yes, agreed as far as your statement goes. We could also add it an earlier date and not impact classes, I hope you'll agree. Just trying not to cast it out into the far future.

Also, I can make a conservative case for restricting "this." parameter name prefixing to constructor. That's where it pays off, and we don't have to worry about unintended consequences in non-constructors.


> and if it were added i see no reason to restrict it solely "constructors".  That said I don't like the syntax at all :D

What, if any, syntax for avoiding repeating each member name three times, do you prefer?

/be
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