ECMA meeting 9/15/98
Present
Mike Cowlishaw (IBM)
Herman Venter (MSFT)
Jeff Dyer (Nombas)
Bill Gibbons (NSCP)
Karl Matzke (SUN)
Clayton Lewis (NSCP)
Norris Boyd (NSCP)
Mike McCabe (NSCP)
Waldemar Horwat (NSCP)
Andrew Clinick (MSFT)
Rok Yu (MSFT)
Next meeting:
10/16/98 12:00 noon to 6:00 p.m. at Microsoft
11/19/98 & 11/20/98 at Netscape including ECMA GA report with Gary Robinson
12/14/98 Telephone meeting
Karl Matzke will be taking a sabbatical for a couple of years so won’t be able to attend the meetings. Sun will provide a replacement.
ECMA 262 Edition 2
The version of the ECMA spec on the web does not include all the "disposition of comments" changes. The existing mechanism is not working well at the moment we need to ensure that we all sign off on the document.
AC will check with the Word team about change tracking and sub documents.
Resolutions:
Version 2.0 – ECMAScript Edition
Bill Gibbons will merge content agreed work into the new base document (the Edition 2).
CL will check with ECMA to see if a mailing list can be set up for technical discussion. If not then he will set up one from NSCP.
NB noted a change to 12.6.1 and will send details to the technical reflector
11.9.6 boundary case for undefined and Null. WH will send email to the reflector
Array.prototype.concat/pop/push/shift
MM will write up proposed text and submit to the group. There was some discussion whether it should be generic.
String.prototype.slice
Rok will draft a recommendation to the mailing list. Get rid of 15.8.4.12 and merge with 15.8.4.13
Try Catch
WH will write up the definition of behavior for side effects in the catch guard. Section 12.14. WH will circulate this definition by 9/28
Computational
Bill Gibbons will provide a document that will describe how ECMAScript Edition 3 should be updated for the November meeting.
7.4 Tokens
Mentions sharp variables so will be looked at after discussion. Tokens will be categorized as a D.
7.7 Literals
This can now be moved to complete since it is already updated in the ECMA 262 Edition 2 specification. Moved to Complete.
7.7.4 String Literals
WH will write up recommendation.
11.8 Relational Operators
instanceOf and in have been submitted as proposals. MM would like to make some changes to the proposals.
12.1 Block
Changed to C
12.2 Variable Statement
Part of the instanceOf proposal. Moves to C
12.4 Expression Statement
Moves to C
12.7 The continue statement and 12.8 The break statement
Moved to C
12.10 With Statement
More discussion required
12.11 Switch
Moved to complete
12.14 Try Statement
WH will write up proposal
15.3.5.1 Properties of Function Instances
Should be removed when the Edition 2 document is merged with the Edition 3 proposals
15.3.5.2 Arity
15.5.5 HasInstance
15.12.2.11 min and max
WH will prepare a draft
Regular Expressions
AC will document differences and provide a proposal of what we might standardize in ECMA Edition 3
ECMA 262 9/16/1998
W3C Related Issues
Martin Duerst
URN’s use UTF-8 IMAP uses UTF-8 for URI FTP uses UTF-8 (or will do very soon)
Xerox were involved in this decision
Characters
UCS
UTF-8
%HH
RFC 2396 covers UTF-8 and %HH
2 new functions uriEncode and uriDecode that will deal with encoding into the %HH
Martin Duerst will provide a URL to his talk from the last Unicode meeting
Spice/XSL
Dave Raggett to mail the docs to AC
AC will organize a meeting with Spice, NSCP and MSFT
Docs by the beginning of October
Meeting in the UK in the first week of November
Internationalization
IBM suggested that ECMAScript should have a minimal set and the host application should provide more features. This was discussed further and the group felt that the locale features should be in an external function/class library. Single local model does have numerous problems.
7.7.5 Regular Expression Literals
www.unicode.org/techreports number 15 contains more informationDeals with computer readable text not natural language at the moment. The group will consider having language sensitive regexp syntax input is requested for this in the future.
9.3.1 toNumber Applied to the String Type
The StrWhiteSpaceChar should be extended to include all Unicode white space characters. The spec should refer to the Unicode character class. The function should stay the same as it is today and the new spec should include a solution to provide locale specific methods.
9.8.1 toString
See 9.3.1
11.8.5 Comparison operators and 11.9.3 Equality operators
Define separate methods to deal with this problem e.g. mystring.compare(otherstring)
12.11 The Switch statement
This is covered assuming the host normalizes the data before the script is run. It was suggested that the string object have a normalize method to provide normalized data at runtime.
15.7.4.8 Array.prototype.reverse()
Since an array is not a string in ECMAScript this does not apply
15.7.4.9 Array.prototype.shift()
Since an array is not a string in ECMAScript this does not apply
15.8.* String Object
Some functionality for identifying characters in the string
ToLower, toUpper, and toTitleCase
Should have a locale argument to allow for locale
15.9.1 \w & \W
Doesn’t include $ which is a valid ECMAScript control character. The regExp spec should be reviewed and in general use Unicode categories