April 10 2014 Meeting Notes

[Mark S. Miller]

+1, especially on the last point. As something added to iterators rather
than iterables in ES6, there's no reason for "return" to be a symbol rather
than a string.


On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 9:59 AM, Brendan Eich <brendan at mozilla.org> wrote:

> Kevin Smith wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>     In this case we have try-finally statements as an existing
>>     feature.  The semantics of this feature is a bounded execution
>>     scope with a cleanup action on completion. This feature is widely
>>     used and has always been internally consistent and reliable,
>>     expect for catastrophic external failure or intervention (ie,
>>     externally imposed process termination, power failure, etc).
>>      People use it for all sorts of things, including bounded resource
>>     management.
>>
>>
>> Zeroing in on "cleanup action on completion":  don't co-routines by
>> nature prohibit us from reasoning in this way about completion?  It seems
>> to me that this shift is broader than just `try/finally`, although I agree
>> that `try/finally` shows some particularly acute symptoms.
>>
>> And I also agree that we should not provide gratuitous footguns.
>>  Unfortunately, though, I'm having a hard time forming an opinion on how
>> disallowing `try/yield/finally` would balance out.
>>
>
> We're at risk of going around the design wheel again.
>
> Python started by banning yield in try: and then added it, with
> GeneratorExit as a magic exception thrown from Python's implicitly-called
> generator.close method at a yield-in-try that would run the finally clauses.
>
> When Igor Bukanov and I were working on ES4 and prototyping it in
> SpiderMonkey, Igor urged forcing a return instead of throwing a magic
> exception. He even persuaded Philip J. Eby on python-dev that forcing
> return was better, possibly even for Python (which IIRC then went in the
> direction of reifying control effects as exceptions).
>
> Instead of kicking the can and dragging this out yet again, I'm ok with
> return automation as proposed. Yeah, we're doing a common-ish use-case
> affordance. No, it isn't the last case where scoped resource release will
> come up. But yes, it has precedent in other languages and it's useful.
>
> BTW Dave Herman persuaded me we don't need to use a symbol for the name;
> 'return' is ok if 'next' is. The iteration protocol hooks via @@iterator,
> which returns an instance of something coded  new implementations, so
> implementors can avoid using 'return' for a different purpose without
> conflict. IOW, one symbol-name is enough!
>
> /be
>
>
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-- 
    Cheers,
    --MarkM
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