On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 7:15 PM, Brendan Eich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> No, prototypes are here to stay. There's even Object.create to > relieve prototypers from having to write constructor functions. > > The desire to explore ZI is two-fold: > > 1. It may help the committee to see the smallest possible proposal, > and work up from there to SI and MI. > > 2. It may help the language to avoid adding another kind of > inheritance than prototype-based delegation. In a famous email, which many here have probably read, Alan Kay wrote about leaving inheritance out of "object-oriented programming". From: http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht81Ht/doc_kay_oop_en <blockquote> - I didn't like the way Simula I or Simula 67 did inheritance (though I thought Nygaard and Dahl were just tremendous thinkers and designers). So I decided to leave out inheritance as a built-in feature until I understood it better. </blockquote> This conservative approach seems apt for the situation of classes and inheritance in ECMAScript. If classes are to be merely sugar for other language features (purely ES3.1 features?), we don't know exactly what those other parts are and have no experience seeing what is possible with those, then we certainly don't understand how inheritance fits into either the desugared or sugar pictures. It could be that the boilerplate that inheritance tries to solve is not a big problem as I tried to show in the observer pattern example. It seems reasonable to follow Alan's conservative approach before jumping into the deep water of inheritance which has a variable track records. Peter _______________________________________________ Es-discuss mailing list Es-discuss@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
