> I do not yet fully understand the rationale behind dicts. Nothing fancy, really. Just an idiomatic way to create a non-polluted string-to-value map. In ES5 you can use Object.create(null), which is not bad but still kind of a hack. Wouldn't it be nice to have sweet literal syntax for a dictionary that you know is not going to pull any any of the complexities of the object semantics?
My main issues with the proposal at this point are 1) the cost of new typeof types, and 2) the syntax doesn't work for the case of empty dictionaries. > - Why does it need to use the same mechanism for looking up keys as objects? > Couldn’t methods be introduced for this? Then a dict could have other > methods, too (even if they come from a wrapper type). For example, a size() > method. The point was for it not to be an object. A much flatter kind of data structure. You could think of it as formalizing the internal concept of an object's own-properties table. > - Why not allow any kind of key? Why restrict keys to strings? That seems > arbitrary. As I say, what inspired me to explore the idea was exposing the internal concept of an own-property table as a first-class data structure. It's just a simpler primitive to work with than an object. We might want to allow name objects as keys too, to continue tracking the notion that a dictionary is a mapping from property names to values. Dave _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list es-discuss@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
