Re:EcmaScript Sixth Edition
by gsnedders on Thursday July 03, 2014 @09:59AM
(#7983073)
> Also, can someone in the know care to tell me why that is that those additions for what is the end rather basic functionality is coming so late to the language?
Back when IE was stagnating, when nobody was working on anything more than maintaining IE6, TC-39 (the technical committee that works on ECMAScript) was working towards a 4th revision of the standard (i.e., ES4), incorporating a lot of quite reasonable things (like the above) but also quite a lot of things based on very recent research. There was pushback against quite so aggressively moving forward in a single revision, especially incorporating so much from academia not already proven elsewhere (the browser space is very conservative about breaking existing content, so if something that turned out to be a bad idea shipped, it'd be very very hard to get rid of). In the end, there was relatively significant pushback once MS reappeared from themselves, Yahoo, and a number of other contributors.
Moving forward, the plan was essentially to tidy up the ES3 spec with minor additions, which was originally referred to as ES3.1 but eventually standardised as ES5. ES6 is the next revision of this branch of the standard.
ActionScript 3, as Flash uses, is based on one of the drafts of ES4, and prior to the abandonment of Flash development, the intention was to continue to evolve the language separately to ECMAScript.
Back when IE was stagnating, when nobody was working on anything more than maintaining IE6, TC-39 (the technical committee that works on ECMAScript) was working towards a 4th revision of the standard (i.e., ES4), incorporating a lot of quite reasonable things (like the above) but also quite a lot of things based on very recent research. There was pushback against quite so aggressively moving forward in a single revision, especially incorporating so much from academia not already proven elsewhere (the browser space is very conservative about breaking existing content, so if something that turned out to be a bad idea shipped, it'd be very very hard to get rid of). In the end, there was relatively significant pushback once MS reappeared from themselves, Yahoo, and a number of other contributors.
Moving forward, the plan was essentially to tidy up the ES3 spec with minor additions, which was originally referred to as ES3.1 but eventually standardised as ES5. ES6 is the next revision of this branch of the standard.
ActionScript 3, as Flash uses, is based on one of the drafts of ES4, and prior to the abandonment of Flash development, the intention was to continue to evolve the language separately to ECMAScript.