On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 5:13 PM, David Herman <dher...@mozilla.com> wrote: > We had a good discussion about modules at this week's meeting, and Sam > Tobin-Hochstadt and I have worked out a strawman for a simple module system. > I've posted a first draft to the wiki: > > http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:simple_modules > > There are lots of examples to peruse at: > > http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:simple_modules_examples > > which might also be a decent starting point to get a feel for the design.
Thanks for the examples page. I think it would be useful to have comparable examples for the other 3 modules strawmen too. > This has a good bit of overlap with -- and is in many ways inspired by -- > Ihab and Chris's work, but it has at least one major departure: modules in > this proposal are not inherently first class values, although we do provide > ways of getting objects that reflect the contents of modules. So, as Brendan described, they're not first class because you want to analyze dependencies statically? I agree that's a really common requirement. I've found that to be a problematic area of CommonJS modules, but I think it can be resolved pretty easily. I will write something about this, but basically I just have a special syntactic restriction on require() statements. "embeddable" modules are a subset of modules, and are statically analyzable. The 3 use cases I see for statically analyzing dependencies are: 1. async/parallel module retrieval over HTTP (need to retrieve modules before evaluating them) 2. static "linking" (what http://code.google.com/p/gelatin-js/ does, need to get dependencies without executing the program) 3. parameterized modules / module metaprogramming (need to get dependencies first for exposing to users) For comparison, I would point to the fact Python has evolved a crazy number of module metaprogramming facilities over the years. It isn't obvious why, but basically any large Python program does something "weird" with modules in my experience (i.e. involving a Turing complete language): http://docs.python.org/library/modules.html#importing-modules thanks, Andy _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list es-discuss@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
