On 2008-08-25, at 17:26EDT, Kris Zyp wrote: > This why I would like to ensure that class sugar also used a > prototype-based model, so existing class structures are compatible > with the new syntax.
[Late to the party..., perhaps the dishes have already been cleared?] Me too. If classes are sugar, I would want them to be sugar for prototype-based inheritance. If that is compatible with 'zero class- based inheritance', fine. Whether classes are sugar or not, I would not want them to be used for access control. I'm against instance-private. I'd much rather see an orthogonal module system for controlling access/visibility. Finally, if classes are sugar, they should not be creating some magic 'auto-binding method extraction'. I'd like to see us do away with 'this' as much as anyone else, but not by sweeping it under the covers. I'd much rather make 'this' explicit and just declare that: foo.bar(...) is sugar for: bar(this=foo, ...) and bar(...) is sugar for bar(this=undefined, ...) --- I hear that this is not a vote, so a bit of rationale: Like many other AJAX frameworks, we found straight prototype-based programming too verbose. We invented a class syntax (modeled on es4) and wrote a translator that 'de-sugars' that into prototype-based inheritance. We've recently brought our translator up to speed to be able to translate to as3 (prototype es4, to me), and there was very little pain in adapting our class system to map to either prototype- or class-based inheritance. For the work that we want to do, they are equivalent. Since desugaring to closures seems to be mostly about creating private instance variables, if you separate out the access control issue from your classes, there seems little motivation for that approach. The 'this' riff is just a personal peeve. As someone else said on the list, you are not going to get everyone to agree what object-oriented means. But to me, it definitely does _not_ mean that methods belong to instances. If methods don't belong to instances, what could 'this' possibly refer to? _______________________________________________ Es-discuss mailing list Es-discuss@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
