Re: an idea for replacing arguments.length

Boris Zbarsky wrote:
> On 11/12/13 11:24 AM, Brendan Eich wrote:
>> Yeah, why are *new* (this is from Web Events, not legacy) APIs doing the
>> crazy. Answer: because people imitate older crazy APIs, and WebIDL
>> supports this.
>
> No.  In this case it's because the spec started out one way (with the 
> sequence, iirc) but then got changed to the other way, but 
> implementations had already shipped the first way, so now for compat 
> they support both.

Oh, ok -- new-ish legacy. This makes the case for stronger normative 
specs against such overloading, starting with WebIDL.

> If webidl didn't allow this, they'd just use "any..." and define it 
> all in prose, I assume.

Perhaps, and that raises a good point: JS allows all kinds of bad 
overloading. Doesn't mean we should encourage it in the WebIDL-based 
specs, though.

/be