new since ActionScript 3.0 lecture notes

# colin at moock.org (18 years ago)

greetings all, i'm a long-time lurker, full time ActionScript developer.

i have an upcoming presentation at FITC in amsterdam (february) and toronto (april) that covers the features in ecma4 that are new to ActionScript (i.e., those not already in ActionScript 3.0).

my lecture notes are here:

# colin at moock.org (18 years ago)

as i was saying before [ctrl + v, enter] turned into [ctrl + enter] (maybe ctrl+enter is a bad thunderbird shortcut?)....

my lecture notes are here: moock.org/lectures/newInECMAScript4

they are nearly entirely based on the overview at: www.ecmascript.org/es4/spec/overview.pdf

and the proposals at: proposals:proposals

and francis cheng's helpful guidance.

comments, corrections, and all feedback very much appreciated.

for the curious, you can find information about FITC, the popular Flash conference where i'll be delivering the presentation, here:

www.fitc.ca

sorry for the double-send.

humbly, colin moock

# Graydon Hoare (18 years ago)

colin at moock.org wrote:

as i was saying before [ctrl + v, enter] turned into [ctrl + enter] (maybe ctrl+enter is a bad thunderbird shortcut?)....

my lecture notes are here: moock.org/lectures/newInECMAScript4

they are nearly entirely based on the overview at: www.ecmascript.org/es4/spec/overview.pdf

and the proposals at: proposals:proposals

and francis cheng's helpful guidance.

comments, corrections, and all feedback very much appreciated.

Some corrections:

  • Union types are spelled (x|y|z) now, not (x,y,z). Popularity contest, the pipe character won.

  • ES3 primitives are not exactly "gone", they are simply assigned to classes that (hopefully!) perfectly emulate their old semantics. There is some (mandated) magic behavior in these classes for proper backward-compatibility.

  • The structure of some of these features is presently in debate within the committee: at least units, numeric types, generic functions, operator overloading, wrap, tail calls.

  • The ES4 wiki has proven to be less-than-ideal for hashing out proposals and amendments, so much of the discussion and work now takes place within the ES4 ticket tracking system (in which there are linear conversations and tickets progress through defined states). bugs.ecmascript.org

Otherwise, good luck with the presentation! Please do emphasize that the language is a work in progress -- as are its various implementations

# Peter Hall (18 years ago)
  • Union types are spelled (x|y|z) now, not (x,y,z). Popularity contest, the pipe character won.

Didn't notice that change! (and I like it :))

Peter

# Brendan Eich (18 years ago)

On Feb 13, 2008, at 3:46 PM, Peter Hall wrote:

  • Union types are spelled (x|y|z) now, not (x,y,z). Popularity contest, the pipe character won.

Didn't notice that change! (and I like it :))

Popularity, but deeper reasons include (a) more future-proof; (b)
precedent from other PLs.

# Peter Hall (18 years ago)

From the discussions that I can recall, I thought it was to permit

more complex type combinations, adding intersection types using "&". (which is why I like the change).

Peter

# Brendan Eich (18 years ago)

On Feb 13, 2008, at 3:57 PM, Peter Hall wrote:

From the discussions that I can recall, I thought it was to permit more complex type combinations, adding intersection types using "&". (which is why I like the change).

That was one meaning of "future-proof", yeah. Another was to avoid
overloading poor old comma, which might want to be used for something
tuple-ish.