Javascript is good enough

Re:Javascript is good enough by maxwell on Saturday January 31, 2009 @10:48PM (#460483)

This is one of those features that I've read Lua has and JS doesn't that sounds really good in theory. But I haven't ever run into a situation where I've wanted an index other than a number or string. It's probably just a blub paradox though; I'm curious, in what situations are other values particularly useful as keys?

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Re:Javascript is good enough by boucher on Sunday February 01, 2009 @03:57AM (#460715)

Any time you ever need to map an object to another object, you need this functionality.

Without a memory address, object's don't have any other unique values associated with them. It's actually a pretty fundamental problem.

Of course, like most things wrong with javascript, you can fix it if you work for it. Objective-J fixes all the things we had problems with, and this is one of them. A lot of things in Cappuccino would not be possible without the hashing feature Tom mentioned.

As a hash table, JavaScript objects are pretty awful. You can't get a count of objects unless you literally count all the keys. And you can't iterate over the keys if anyone else has added anything to the Object prototype.

Cappuccino has a proper hash table, CPDictionary, which solves both of those problems. There's a lot of other data structures that address some of the author's listed concerns.

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Re:Javascript is good enough by LogicHoleFlaw on Saturday January 31, 2009 @11:19PM (#460508)

In Lua I've done stuff like maps of functions to tables of functions for permuting different methods of computation... kinda wacky but it does what I need.

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