Re: Seeking pre-LCWD comments for Indexed Database API; deadline February 2

On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 9:52 PM, Pablo Castro <Pablo.Castro@microsoft.com>wrote:

>
> From: jorlow@google.com [mailto:jorlow@google.com] On Behalf Of Jeremy
> Orlow
> Sent: Friday, June 11, 2010 3:20 AM
> Subject: Re: Seeking pre-LCWD comments for Indexed Database API; deadline
> February 2
>
> On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 1:54 AM, Pablo Castro <Pablo.Castro@microsoft.com>
> wrote:
>
>
> From: Kris Zyp [mailto:kris@sitepen.com]
> Sent: Thursday, June 10, 2010 4:38 PM
> Subject: Re: Seeking pre-LCWD comments for Indexed Database API; deadline
> February 2
>
> >> >> So there is a real likelyhood of a browser implementation that will
> >> >> predate it's associated JS engine's upgrade to ES5? Feeling a
> >> >> "concern" isn't really much of technical argument on it's own, and
> >> >> designing for outdated technology is a poor approach.
> >> I don't think there is, just wanted to avoid imposing it. If you think
> it's really important then let's change it back to delete assuming other
> folks are good with it.
>
> >> I had the same concerns Pablo did, but I don't feel strongly either way.
>
> Before we close on this, let me validate one more thing independently of
> the JS version. Are we going to have trouble when trying to expose these
> interfaces in C++? Not sure about other compilers and IDL processing tools,
> but I'm playing around with Visual Studio 2010 and while the COM IDL
> compiler will take "delete" as an interface member, my C++ compiler really
> doesn't like it. As far as I know there is no standard syntax to indicate
> that a symbol wasn't meant to be a keyword in C++, so having "delete" (or
> other C++ keywords for that matter) would be problematic. Am I missing
> something?
>

Good point.  Does anyone have a strong opinion on how much we should care
about reserved word conflicts in language other than JavaScript?  it seems
like a slippery slope.

As an example, "IDBDatabase.description" is actually used by the ObjectiveC
base object class and so this caused some problems initially.  We worked
around it by having the ObjectiveC bindings generator add a suffix whenever
an attribute named "description" is hit.  (Something similar was done for
"hash" and "id" in other APIs.)

To be honest, I hadn't even considered bringing this up and asking for it to
be changed, but if we're going to avoid delete because it's a reserved word
in JavaScript (pre v5) and/or because it's a reserved word in C++, perhaps
we should consider changing description as well?

J