On Jan 22, 2008, at 11:51 AM, Neil Mix wrote: >> But why won't we feel it, as trace-readers, just as much when the >> PTCs were explicit? This, I don't follow. The programmer and the >> debugger-driver are often very different people, in general skills, >> familiarity with the source at hand, etc. > > We will, but the point is: you (or someone you work with) made the > decision that the benefit was worth the risk.
On the www, everyone is my colleague. I'm not kidding (have to talk to management about the quality of hiring lately :-P). > Implicit PTC turns > that choice into an irreversible default. I'm not worried about > those who choose to use it, I'm worried about those who'd like to > choose not to. The program will diverge if someone chooses not to implement PTC, so it's going to be required. The confusing traces and debugging views of the stack (which is not a program history!) can be mitigated. But to your point, I think the party of the first part (the programmer who wrote code that uses tail calls) must prevail, whether or not they intended tail calls or expressed them explicitly. Lars made this point recently: unless we ban implicit PTC even when not elected by the programmer using explicit syntax, code will come to depend on PTC and we'll need it implicitly "on" everywhere. All that remains is the assertion. /be _______________________________________________ Es4-discuss mailing list Es4-discuss@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es4-discuss
