Re: Understanding reasons for Harmony
Brendan, Great shame, but as you say its a broken design. Many thanks for the full explanation, Aaron - Original Message - From: Brendan Eich To: Aaron Gray Cc: es-discuss@mozilla.org Sent: Monday, December 01, 2008 1:06 AM Subject: Re: Understanding reasons for Harmony On Nov 30, 2008, at 10:49 AM, Aaron Gray wrote: Well as announced in August the ECMAScript 4 language is being heavily watered down. Both packages (April) https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2008-April/006183.html I cannot actually see what is wrong here, AFAICS package Q's usage of x should be an error as x is actually defined in R as external and there is no other definition of x in scope. Package Q contains import R.*; which brings (or should bring) R.x into scope under the name x in Q. Note that external does not mean what extern in C means. It was a proposed ES4 built-in namespace meaning defined in this package but visible outside of it. Could someone explain or give a better example. I can see how the decisions are hard to understand without close reading, including knowing what external was proposed to mean (I can't find a trace of it in the wiki -- it was cut too well), and thinking through the meaning of parenthetical asides such as Lars's consider that public::x is introduced in some later file, at a later time and consider flagging the reference to x in P as ambiguous. Even more important than these fine points was the big-picture point that packages were intended to be sugar for namespaces. Lack of a desugaring meant ES4 was at risk of being all of late, incomplete, and inconsistent. If there were no conflict about the meaning of x in P, then we would have not had such a problem. Avoiding a conflict by making the reference to x ambiguous (an error) was considered arcane because the nesting and order of package fragments should not introduce or eliminate such an error. As with namespaces (more below), package-based name lookup must agree between compile time and runtime. They must not be subject to complicated and hard-to-follow rules. Plus, we had a schedule for ES4 that was being slipped with every open problem of this order. The right thing to do per sane requirements management is to cut, with additions such as the built-in internal namespace added to palliate the loss of packages in a future-proof way. Therefore the example Lars gave is sufficient -- you don't need a better example. That one was sufficient to kill packages as sugar in the time-frame we had for ES4. and now namespaces have been jetisoned too. https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2008-August/006837.html Again could someone give a good example of whats wrong with namespaces. The fundamental problem with namespaces was the lack of a module system by which to prioritize namespaces during name lookup. This need for prioritization (one idea was a first-name-wins reservation system) affected both unqualified name lookup due to the extensible global object, and name lookup among superclasses. Consider just the global object case, with two namespaces, both open in the same lexical scope, where a namespace ns is defined at first in only one of the namespaces (note how namespaces can qualify namespace names along with other names): namespace A; namespace B; use namespace A, namespace B; A namespace ns; Let's say there's a use of ns to qualify an identifier x, in the same lexical scope (top-level content in a script tag, in a web page): ... ns::x ... Assume x resolves in ns. The question is: what does ns mean? Let's refine the reference to be in a function body: function foo() { ... ns::x ... } and close this lexical scope (program defined as a script tag's inline content or out-of-line src=URL content). Then in a later program evaluated in the same global object, we add B namespace ns; foo(); What effect, if any, does the B::ns namespace have on the meaning of ns::x in foo's body? We don't want any effect, even an ambiguity error -- otherwise name integrity is gone and information leaks if not hijacking attacks are too easy. Lexical scope means the name lookoup judgments at compile time and runtime should agree, and foo's scope should be static in all senses. But how do we implement this? ES4 had only the reservation system idea whereby: A namespace ns; would reserve ns in *all* namespaces, even ones not seen yet, for the life of the global object being mutated by the definitions. This was considered broken-as-designed. An alternative would treat each top-level scope as a module, either by giving it its own global object (as is done in AS3, IIRC), or at least a subjective prioritization mechanism by which to make ns mean only A::ns when used in foo, no matter what B::ns might be defined later
Understanding reasons for Harmony
Well as announced in August the ECMAScript 4 language is being heavily watered down. Both packages (April) https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2008-April/006183.html I cannot actually see what is wrong here, AFAICS package Q's usage of x should be an error as x is actually defined in R as external and there is no other definition of x in scope. Could someone explain or give a better example. and now namespaces have been jetisoned too. https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2008-August/006837.html Again could someone give a good example of whats wrong with namespaces. Many thanks in advance, Aaron ___ Es-discuss mailing list Es-discuss@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
Re: Understanding reasons for Harmony
On Nov 30, 2008, at 10:49 AM, Aaron Gray wrote: Well as announced in August the ECMAScript 4 language is being heavily watered down. Both packages (April) https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2008-April/006183.html I cannot actually see what is wrong here, AFAICS package Q's usage of x should be an error as x is actually defined in R as external and there is no other definition of x in scope. Package Q contains import R.*; which brings (or should bring) R.x into scope under the name x in Q. Note that external does not mean what extern in C means. It was a proposed ES4 built-in namespace meaning defined in this package but visible outside of it. Could someone explain or give a better example. I can see how the decisions are hard to understand without close reading, including knowing what external was proposed to mean (I can't find a trace of it in the wiki -- it was cut too well), and thinking through the meaning of parenthetical asides such as Lars's consider that public::x is introduced in some later file, at a later time and consider flagging the reference to x in P as ambiguous. Even more important than these fine points was the big-picture point that packages were intended to be sugar for namespaces. Lack of a desugaring meant ES4 was at risk of being all of late, incomplete, and inconsistent. If there were no conflict about the meaning of x in P, then we would have not had such a problem. Avoiding a conflict by making the reference to x ambiguous (an error) was considered arcane because the nesting and order of package fragments should not introduce or eliminate such an error. As with namespaces (more below), package-based name lookup must agree between compile time and runtime. They must not be subject to complicated and hard-to-follow rules. Plus, we had a schedule for ES4 that was being slipped with every open problem of this order. The right thing to do per sane requirements management is to cut, with additions such as the built-in internal namespace added to palliate the loss of packages in a future-proof way. Therefore the example Lars gave is sufficient -- you don't need a better example. That one was sufficient to kill packages as sugar in the time-frame we had for ES4. and now namespaces have been jetisoned too. https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2008-August/006837.html Again could someone give a good example of whats wrong with namespaces. The fundamental problem with namespaces was the lack of a module system by which to prioritize namespaces during name lookup. This need for prioritization (one idea was a first-name-wins reservation system) affected both unqualified name lookup due to the extensible global object, and name lookup among superclasses. Consider just the global object case, with two namespaces, both open in the same lexical scope, where a namespace ns is defined at first in only one of the namespaces (note how namespaces can qualify namespace names along with other names): namespace A; namespace B; use namespace A, namespace B; A namespace ns; Let's say there's a use of ns to qualify an identifier x, in the same lexical scope (top-level content in a script tag, in a web page): ... ns::x ... Assume x resolves in ns. The question is: what does ns mean? Let's refine the reference to be in a function body: function foo() { ... ns::x ... } and close this lexical scope (program defined as a script tag's inline content or out-of-line src=URL content). Then in a later program evaluated in the same global object, we add B namespace ns; foo(); What effect, if any, does the B::ns namespace have on the meaning of ns::x in foo's body? We don't want any effect, even an ambiguity error -- otherwise name integrity is gone and information leaks if not hijacking attacks are too easy. Lexical scope means the name lookoup judgments at compile time and runtime should agree, and foo's scope should be static in all senses. But how do we implement this? ES4 had only the reservation system idea whereby: A namespace ns; would reserve ns in *all* namespaces, even ones not seen yet, for the life of the global object being mutated by the definitions. This was considered broken-as-designed. An alternative would treat each top-level scope as a module, either by giving it its own global object (as is done in AS3, IIRC), or at least a subjective prioritization mechanism by which to make ns mean only A::ns when used in foo, no matter what B::ns might be defined later. But such a solution was not designed or proposed for ES4, and we were out of time and complexity budget. /be___ Es-discuss mailing list Es-discuss@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss