Re: Javascript: Time Traveller From the Year 1962!

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From: peter (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: Javascript: Time Traveller From the Year 1962!
Date: 02:13 on 10 Apr 2005
> I was thinking about this some more and it occured to me.. since the above is 
> an extension to the DOM, not the core language,

Bingo. It's a function of the hosting environment, not the language.

> it assumes its going to be 
> running inside a web browser: a trusted environment on an unknown platform. 

An untrusted environment on an unknown platform. But if it's server-side
Javascript, it's a different environment, and if it's Javascript run from
a commandline it's in yet another environment, and if it's compiled
Javascript it's something else altogether.

You were saying that Javascript won't ever be a general purpose language
without this. I'm saying it won't ever be one if you hardcode assumptions
about the hosting environment in the language.

> You don't want to be shipping machine code.

There's no difference between machine code and bytecode here.

> Best you can do is byte-code
> to be run through a VM.  The byte-code compiler can spot the include()s and
> compile them as well.

So can the machine code compiler. No difference.

> You would have to include the limitation that 
> include() only takes a static string, not a variable, but that's ok by me.

But that would completely block any use of include() in portable code that
isn't bound to the file layout on the webserver, which voids your objection
to using SSI or preprocessors or other server-side techniques, since you'll
have to run at least one perprocessing pass over the code to configure it
for the target system.

There's stuff above here

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