On 03/21/11 13:13, Erik Arvidsson wrote:
The thread about using private names is getting a bit unwieldy but I'd
like to focus on the use case that I have been thinking of as
"Lexically scoped monkey patching" or "Lexically scoped object
extensions" instead of focusing on how to use "private names" to fit
this scenario.
Extending built ins and modifying existing classes to work around bugs
or to provide a better API is (or was) a common pattern. Today a lot
of JS library shun this approach due to the risk of conflicts.
Let us assume that you could extend an object in your current lexical
scope and that such extensions could be imported from a module into
your current scope.
Given:
{
function largerThanN(obj, n) {
return obj.filter(function(item) {
return item> n;
}
}
var a = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4];
print(largerThanN(a, 2));
}
Now we would like to make largerThanN to work with Object objects. The
naïve thing to do is to just to add a filter method to
Object.prototype. However, this might cause conflicts with other code
that uses objects. The idea here is that we can do this safely in our
scope (ignore syntax except that it is important that it can be done
statically).
{
extend Object.prototype with {
filter: function(fun) {
var retval = {};
for (var key in this) {
if (fun(this[key])
retval[key] = this[key];
}
return retval;
}
};
function largerThanN(obj, n) {
return obj.filter(function(item) {
return item> n;
}
}
var a = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4];
print(largerThanN(a, 2));
var o = {a: 0, b: 1, c: 2, d: 3, e: 4};
print(largerThanN(0, 2));
}
The above use case cannot be solved using private names because
private names conflict with public names.
Can we agree that this is a use case that we care about and focus on
this instead of whether private names can or cannot do this?
Yes, this is useful. If you follow this to its logical conclusion (in
particular, supporting Allen's use cases), you'll get something analogous to
ES4 namespaces.
Waldemar
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