Hi, _Foreword_ Each time I write "setTimeout", I mean "setTimeout and setInterval (and there clear functions)" (please forgive the recursive flaw)
_Introduction_ Before the concurrency proposal (http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:concurrency), a pure ECMAScript program had a start and an end, that was it. No event loop, no asynchronous callback, etc. If ECMAScript standardizes this proposal or another, there will be a need to standardize an event loop in a way or another. Adding a timing aspect to this event loop and setTimeout can be standardized in ECMAScript. _Current_standardization_state_ setTimeout isn't part of ECMAScript. setTimeout is nonetheless standardized as part of "HTML Standard" (http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/timers.html#timers). Besides the "task" dependency (which is part of the standardized event-loop in the same document: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/webappapis.html#concept-task), this is more or less ECMAScript. _Current_use_ As anyone will have certainly noticed, setTimeout has no reason to be considered as client-side web specific. And, as a matter of fact, there is a setTimeout in node.js and in ActionScript apparently. I wouldn't be surprised if most (if not all) ECMAScript-based languages had a setTimeout function consistently. For all these reasons, I am wondering if setTimeout wouldn't be had being standardized in ECMAScript itself. _How?_ I currently see two main tracks: * Standardize it as it is. * Standardize a more powerful mecanism and standardize setTimeout as an implementation based on this mecanism. If setTimeout had been considered as not flexible enough by some people, this could be an occasion to fit their use case (I personnally have no suggestion on the matter) I am not familiar with promises, but after reading a bit about it and seeing a presentation on the topic, I intuit that it may not be very difficult to add a timing aspect to it based on which setTimeout could be implemented. _Advantages_ * As said, it could be an occasion to fix flexibility issues that people would find to setTimeout * Define a strict mode behavior to it. Currently, people can pass strings as first argument to setTimeout. There is currently a spec hole in what happens in strict mode for setTimeout. I would be in favor to throw an exception if people use strings in setTimeout in strict mode (maybe it's too late to suggest that since FF4 ships in less than a week?).Anyway, there is room for other ideas like standardizing strict eval for strings as first argument in strict mode. My main goal is to discuss the issue. I haven't found any trace of previous discussion of this topic. Has there been any? David
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