On Jan 27, 2014 2:09 PM, "David Herman" <dherman at mozilla.com> wrote:
>
> I'd like to suggest another sense in which you may have gone down a bad
path: you're assuming that await is paired with function*, but it could
instead be (like C#) paired with its own async-function syntactic form.
Let's say for the sake of argument that async is just a keyword that takes
a function form:
>
>   async function sizeOfZombocom() {
>     let all = await download("http://zombo.com");
>     return all.length;
>   }

This is similar to way we implemented async in Traceur a few years ago
(time flies). A lot of code can be be shared between generators and async
functions but you do not want to implement async using generators.

> Imagine we were designing this with a macro system like sweet.js. The
temptation is for `async` to unhygienically bind `await` to a macro within
its body, but Racket has developed a cleaner mechanism for thinking about
paired forms like this, which they call "syntax parameters" (kind of a
confusingly generic sounding name) [1] [2]. The basic idea is that you bind
both `async` and `await` at the same time, so `await` is always bound, even
outside of an async function, but the two collaborate so that `async`
informs `await` of its syntactic context. So it would look something like
this:
>
> Example 1:
>
>   import { async, await } from "async";
>
>   await 1; // syntax error: await used outside of async function
>
> Example 2:
>
>   import { async, await } from "async";
>
>   function* sizeOfZombocom() {
>     let all = await download("http://zombo.com"); // syntax error: await
used outside of async function
>     return all.length;
>   }
>
> Example 3:
>
>   import { async, await } from "async";
>
>   async function sizeOfZombocom() {
>     let all = await download("http://zombo.com"); // great success
>     return all.length;
>   }
>
> This makes your abstraction airtight: `await` is a concept that belongs
to `async` functions, not generator functions; generator functions are
merely the internal implementation technique.
>
> Currently, sweet.js doesn't have syntax parameters, but it'd be a good
experiment to add them them and try implementing async/await as I've
sketched here.
>
> Dave
>
> [1] http://www.greghendershott.com/fear-of-macros/Syntax_parameters.html
> [2] http://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/stxparam.html
>
> On Jan 23, 2014, at 2:14 PM, Bradley Meck <bradley.meck at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I was playing around with generators / looking at await for promises
and notices a very difficult thing revolving around generators not having a
reference to themselves.
> >
> > See:
> >
> > https://gist.github.com/bmeck/72a0f4f448f20cf00f8c
> >
> > I have to end up wrapping the generator function to get a reference to
the generator for passing to nested functions.
> >
> > Is there a reason the execution context is not a generator / there is
no reference back to the generator during [[call]]?
> > _______________________________________________
> > es-discuss mailing list
> > es-discuss at mozilla.org
> > https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
>
> _______________________________________________
> es-discuss mailing list
> es-discuss at mozilla.org
> https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
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On Jan 27, 2014 2:09 PM, "David Herman" <dherman at mozilla.com> wrote:
>
> I'd like to suggest another sense in which you may have gone down a bad path: you're assuming that await is paired with function*, but it could instead be (like C#) paired with its own async-function syntactic form. Let's say for the sake of argument that async is just a keyword that takes a function form:
>
> ```js
>   async function sizeOfZombocom() {
>     let all = await download("http://zombo.com");
>     return all.length;
>   }
> ```

This is similar to way we implemented async in Traceur a few years ago
(time flies). A lot of code can be be shared between generators and async
functions but you do not want to implement async using generators.