Any reason why __proto__ is not a well known symbol?

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 9:14 PM, Coroutines <coroutines at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 8:51 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It was specified before symbols existed, and all implementations do it
>> as a string property.  If we were reinventing it today it would either
>> be a symbol or something in the MOP, but are hands are tied by legacy.
>>
>>> Being that it was not formally spec'd it shouldn't have broke backwards
>>> compatibility either.
>>
>> Backwards compat has nothing to do with specs, and everything to do
>> with existing implementations.  Multiple implementations agreed on
>> __proto__, so our choice was either to leave it unstandardized or spec
>> what the browsers did.
>
> Is there a migration to make it a Symbol in ES7?  (ignorant question?)

There's a lot of code in the wild that uses __proto__ and depends on
it.  We can't remove it until/unless that changes (it won't, at least
not in the near future), and while we have __proto__, there's no
reason to have anything else.

~TJ