[Bug 14878] Rename const to legacyconst

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=14878

--- Comment #11 from Brendan Eich <brendan@mozilla.org> 2011-11-22 06:12:06 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #10)
> Bitmasks are not a good user-facing API for JavaScript. Anecdotally, SproutCore
> 1.x used bitmasks for some state management code in our data store API, and it
> was one of the most confusing (and "weird") parts of that API.

Can you say more? What were people confused about? If it's the botched C
operator precedence heritage, that's informative -- that poisons the whole
well.

> Is there anything lost by simply using String literals for this purpose? As a
> practitioner, I agree with Anne that constant/bitmask APIs are more annoying to
> use, and don't seem to offer any obvious gain other than the emotional appeal
> of cargo-culting a C best practice.

Use cargo culting properly. There are no fake airplanes here, flags and bitwise
operators work. The question is about usability, not sentiment or
pre-scientific pattern-matching.

/be

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Received on Tuesday, 22 November 2011 06:12:08 UTC