On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 8:54 PM, Peter Michaux <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote:
> 2008/11/22 Mark S. Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > > Point.pubClassConst = -3; > > Why not the following? > > public pubClassConst = -3 > I'm glad you raised this first. This example is a good microcosm of the issues distinguishing the two sugar proposal. My reasons for preferring the first: * The second form desugars to the first, but is no more convenient than the first. So introducing sugar here is not justified on convenience grounds. * The second form obscures the difference between variables and properties, which does the ES programmer no favors. In ES, "instance private" means lexically captured variable. ES has no other encapsulation mechanism, and the essence of the classes-as-sugar proposal is to employ that mechanism to create encapsulated instances. "Public" means exactly string-named property. (A third category, class-private instance variables, depends on the introduction of Name objects, which both Cormac and I have left out of our first examples.) As for "familiarity to Java programmers", more people learn ES as their first language that Java. Java programmers have already learned to program. Making things easier for Java programmers to learn, at the price of making it harder for new programmers and for ES3 programmers (as well as functional programmers) seems like a bad tradeoff. ES already won where Java lost. There's no reason for us to imitate its mistakes. It probably makes sense to argue through this one example first, as most of the rest of the differences between the sugar proposals have these same motivations. -- Cheers, --MarkM
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