saam barati wrote:
Thanks. Reading now.
I'm clearly bad at email :/
Naw, this stuff is always harder to find than it should be.
I was there, I just re-read and re-remembered. I do not agree with Allen
that some tiny needle was uniquely threaded. Rather, an aesthetic
preference for the new ES6 binding forms to have a lexical contour of
their own when used at top level prevailed. This leads to problems, not
all of which were known at the time -- but some problems were noted.
The REPL problem, where let z=z; makes a poison pill, could be coped
with by ad-hoc REPL deviations from the spec -- at some cost. Let's set
it aside.
The one-time change to a reference, from global object to lexical
shadowing binding, is a serious flaw. Yes, it could happen due to
explicit scope nesting, but the global scope is apparently uniform.
There's no explicit delimiter.
The implementors seem to be rebelling but I'm not trying to stir up
trouble. It would help if V8 did support let, etc. in sloppy mode. Then
we might see open rebellion among two or more implementors.
When it comes to aesthetics vs. implementability and usability, we have
to throw aesthetics under the bus. This is JavaScript, after all! :-P
Ok, seriously, we did not actually make anything prettier. The top level
is hopeless. All we did was leave a couple of hazards for implementors
and users in ES6.
Making the new binding forms create global properties (or throw trying),
as I implemented long ago for let in ES4 in SpiderMonkey, is ugly, but
it does not introduce any net-new hazards.
/be
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