[whatwg] Scripting Tweaks

[Dean Edwards]

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> On May 19, 2007, at 4:27 PM, Dean Edwards wrote:
>> Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>>> On May 18, 2007, at 10:14 PM, liorean wrote:
>>>> On 19/05/07, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
>>>>> The "uniqueID" thing is really working around a deficiency in JS
>>>>> (inability to use objects as keys).
>>>> ES4 already has something of the kind. See
>>>> <uri:http://developer.mozilla.org/es4/proposals/hashcodes.html>
>>>>
>>>> However, that is not usable in ES3 implementations, which uniqueID is.
>>> The hashcode() function is a library function and could be added to 
>>> ES3 implementations - I'd be willing to support it for WebKit. It 
>>> should be noted though that it has the same security/privacy issues 
>>> as uniqueID:
>>
>> the DOM API is language agnostic. 
>> This feature is too important to leave to scripting language 
>> implementations.
> 
> To my knowledge, most non-JavaScript programming languages already have 
> facilities for hashing on object identity. This is true at least of C++, 
> Java, Objective-C and C; it also appears to be true of Python, Ruby, 
> Perl and C# as far as I can tell from the docs. What language besides 
> JavaScript are you concerned about?
> 

The future looks bright but it is worth pointing out that none of the 
two currently available scripting languages support a hash ID. A DOM 
property will enable those languages (ECMAScript and VBScript) to 
provide backward compatibility.

> Note that hascode() would be more general than uniqueID since it applies 
> even to non-DOM objects; it would still be needed in JavaScript even if 
> uniqueID was added to the DOM.
> 

Agreed. I would use hashCode() if the language allowed it.

-dean