Standard builtins' prototypes and toString

[Till Schneidereit]

On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 1:39 AM, Allen Wirfs-Brock <allen at wirfs-brock.com>
wrote:

>
> On Jun 18, 2014, at 4:12 PM, Brendan Eich wrote:
>
> > Allen Wirfs-Brock wrote:
> >> The spec. current says throw for this Symbol.prototype case.  The
> (reasonable) opposing view is that toString should never throw.  Other than
> the protoype-is-not-an-instance it all about unlikely edge cases where
> toString methods are applied to the wrong kind of object.
> >
> > js> Object.create(null).toString()
> > typein:1:0 TypeError: Object.create(...).toString is not a function
> >
> > It happens. Better to catch that error (Symbol.prototype flowing into an
> implicit conversion) early?
>
> which is pretty much the approach the ES6 spec. has taken WRT toString up
> to now. Tension between catching invalid iplicit toString conversions and
> reliable toString for debugging.
>

I'd posit that there are three different cases for toString:
1) (explictly or implicitly) calling foo.toString, where `foo` is any of
the objects that, by default, exist in a JS global without any user code
having run
2) (explicitly or implicitly) calling foo.toString, where `foo` is some
content script-generated object
3) explicitly calling bar.toString.call(foo), where `foo` and `bar` are
arbitrary objects

The current (ES5) state of things is that 1) can never throw, while both 2)
and 3) might. The current ES6 draft would move 1) over into the latter
camp. I think *that* is the crucial thing to prevent. It's just wrong for
the language to essentially say "here's a bunch of objects. They have
methods. But don't call all of them. Finding out which ones aren't allowed
to be called is left as an excercise to the reader."

Theoretically, Scott's #d still hold the most appeal to me. However, I
don't think it works in a multi-Realm world, hence "theoretically". Given
that, it's #b or #c, where, again, I don't much care which one it'll be.

>
> At any rate, run time tools can really depend upon toString working,  They
> probably should use something like:
>
> function reliableToString(obj) {
>    try {return obj.toString()} catch (e) {
>            try {return {}.toString.call(obj)} catch (f) {
>                  return "[ object ???]"}
>             }
>     }
> }
>

True. It's not clear to me that the web as a whole knows this, though, and
the current state of the spec might teach it the hard way.
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