Global lexical tier

[Brendan Eich]

We are in rapid-release hell/heaven.

This means errata can be issued, and engines can implement the better 
resolution for those errata, compared to what the last major-version _de 
jure_ spec mandated.

Why not?

/be

Adam Klein wrote:
> Note that this behavior in v8/Chrome is only about sloppy mode. In 
> strict mode, v8 implements the ES6 spec (and we'll likely have support 
> for lexical declarations in sloppy mode soon).
>
> Though I personally agree that the top-level lexical scoping in ES6 
> seems unfortunate.
>
> On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 9:53 AM, Matthew Robb <matthewwrobb at gmail.com 
> <mailto:matthewwrobb at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Personally I am a fan of Chrome's CURRENT solution:
>     ```
>     Uncaught SyntaxError: Block-scoped declarations (let, const,
>     function, class) not yet supported outside strict mode
>     ```
>
>
>     - Matthew Robb
>
>     On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 12:08 PM, Jason Orendorff
>     <jason.orendorff at gmail.com <mailto:jason.orendorff at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>         Hi everyone. Can we talk about the global lexical tier?
>
>         This was a mistake, a real blunder. We all should have known
>         better.
>         An extensible intermediate scope implies dynamic scoping. The
>         referent
>         of an identifier can change only once, but it can change. It's
>         like an
>         implicit `with` block around *all code*.
>
>         This pattern for declaring variable in multiple scripts won't work
>         with let/const:
>
>             var MyES3Module = MyES3Module || {};
>
>         There's no workaround except "keep using var".
>
>         It's now possible to get a binding permanently wedged, which
>         is bad for a REPL:
>
>             js> let z = Maht.PI;  // oops, typo
>             ReferenceError: Maht is not defined
>             js> z
>             ReferenceError: binding is not initialized: "z"
>             js> z = 1;
>             ReferenceError: binding is not initialized: "z"
>             js> delete z;
>             false
>             js> let z = 1;
>             SyntaxError: redeclaration of variable: "z"
>
>         For a single name to have two global bindings, both mutable,
>         is astonishing.
>
>         All of this was unnecessary. What's the benefit to users? We ran
>         roughshod over existing practice, invariants, and expectations in
>         order to obtain a kind of self-consistency for `let` that
>         users don't
>         expect or even care about.
>
>         We should have just made toplevel let/const/class create global
>         properties, like var. This is how it was proposed originally
>         and how
>         Babel implements it today. For SpiderMonkey, switching to the
>         worse,
>         less user-friendly way without regressing performance is
>         time-consuming.
>
>         We knew all this. We didn't evaluate it correctly. What we
>         particularly missed is that we already had modules as the way
>         forward
>         to a nice toplevel lexical tier, and weird half measures for
>         scripts
>         were pointless.
>
>         -j
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>
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