Since I talked about valueOf in my original message I'm going to interpret Oliver's comment as saying that even in ES3, without getter/setter extensions, you can still observed the separation of "evaluation" from "coercion". That's correct. In general, the way the ES3 (and 5) spec is written for binary operators of the form expr1 op expr2 any coercion of the value of expr1 types place after the evaluation of expr2. Since expr2 can potentially be an arbitrary expression that includes function calls, side-effects can be generated whi8le evaluating expr2 that are observed to occur before any side-effects from coercion (side-effects of valueOf, etc.) of expr1.
"Fixing" this would require substantial changes to the specification and to existing implementations that I doubt anyone wants to make. So, the main point is that a belief that ECMAScript has or is supposed to have a strict left-to-right evaluation order (as the concept is likely to be understood by typical users of the language) is wrong. For consistency, Dave-Sarah's observation that we first "evaluate" and then "coerce" the operands is probably the guideline we should continue to follow if we ever define any additional operators where the distinction is relevant. allen -----Original Message----- From: es5-discuss-boun...@mozilla.org [mailto:es5-discuss-boun...@mozilla.org] On Behalf Of Oliver Hunt Sent: Friday, November 20, 2009 5:07 PM To: David-Sarah Hopwood Cc: es5-disc...@mozilla.org Subject: Re: ES5 left-to-right evaluation order issues It was also observable through valueOf, toString, etc --Oliver On Nov 20, 2009, at 4:40 PM, David-Sarah Hopwood wrote: > Allen Wirfs-Brock wrote: >> var o={get a() {alert("get a");return a}, get b() {alert ("get b");return >> b}}; >> o.a*o.b; >> >> GetValue calls the accessor get functions, so based upon the above algorithm, >> you would expect to see the alert sequence: "get a", "get b", "a valueOf", >> "b valueOf". This is exactly what happens for existing getter/setter >> implementations in at least FF and Chrome. > > I don't see a significant problem here. The arguments are still *evaluated* > in left-to-right order. They're just not *coerced* at the same time as they > are evaluated. But that was always the case in ES3; it hasn't changed in > ES5. It's just a little bit more easily observable in ES5 because of > getters. > > -- > David-Sarah Hopwood ⚥ http://davidsarah.livejournal.com > > _______________________________________________ > es5-discuss mailing list > es5-disc...@mozilla.org > https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es5-discuss _______________________________________________ es5-discuss mailing list es5-disc...@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es5-discuss _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list es-discuss@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
