Re: [FileAPI] Why is FileList a sequence?

Anne van Kesteren:
> > > Lets at least remove sequence<T> from the draft then.

Cameron McCormack:
> > Other specifications use it, and it really serves a different
> > purpose from things like NodeList, like passing in native Array
> > objects to DOM methods.  So I don’t think we should remove it.

Anne van Kesteren:
> Which specifications use it then?

The ones I could find were: Web Applications 1.0, RDFa API and The
System Information API (admittedly fewer than I thought!).

> And how is that different from using the T[] construct?

Think of sequence<T> like vector<T> in C++, and T[] as a vector<T>&.

The sequence type allows passing in and receiving a list by value.  If
you pass an Array object in to a method expecting a sequence<T>, then
the implementation copies those elements, can never modify the Array
object passed in (apart from the side effects of getters on the Array, I
guess!) and will not hold a reference to it after the method is done,
either.

The array type T[] (which seems to have less buy-in at the moment) is a
reference to an object that is a list of items.  In the JS binding it
maps to a special host object that exposes index properties, has a
length property, and inherits from the Array prototype, so it can behave
similarly to native Arrays.  Passing in an object of this type to a DOM
method allows the implementation to keep a reference to that array, and
it might change it later.  So if your JS has a reference to the object,
then its contents can appear to have changed.  T[] objects can be
writable or read only, too.

It would be bad to define an interface like this:

  interface Cattery {
    sequence<Cat> kittens;
  };

because every time you get the kittens property, a new native Array
object will be created.  If you just want to expose the list of kittens
with something array-like, you could do

  interface Cattery {
    Cat[] kittens;
  };

and then getting the kittens property could return the same “array host
object” each time.

-- 
Cameron McCormack ≝ http://mcc.id.au/

Received on Thursday, 10 March 2011 20:29:57 UTC