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Re: Remove numeric constants from WebRTC

From: Harald Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no>
Date: Mon, 02 Jan 2012 08:57:15 +0100
Message-ID: <4F01635B.2010608@alvestrand.no>
To: "Tab Atkins Jr." <jackalmage@gmail.com>
CC: Cullen Jennings <fluffy@cisco.com>, public-webrtc@w3.org, hta@google.com
On 12/30/2011 05:19 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 12:47 AM, Cullen Jennings<fluffy@cisco.com>  wrote:
>> I'll note that using strings instead of integers is somewhat crappy when an API call needs to be mapped to ENUMs in other programming languages such as C.
> We've moved away from caring about languages other than Javascript
> when designing web APIs; years of struggling with the turgid horror of
> the original DOM (designed for easy compat with Java) taught us that
> lesson.  ^_^  This is a large part of the reason why we created WebIDL
> rather than just continuing to use IDL.
>
> That said, if an API like this does need to be expressed in another
> language where enums are more natural than strings, there's nothing
> wrong with defining an enum in their binding.  It should just stay out
> of the web-facing API binding, which is meant to favor JS.
I believe the conversion between a C enum, a Java enum (the 2 are *not* 
semantic equivalents) and a string should be possible to write as part 
of WebIDL-parsing/code generation, if needed.

What worries me a bit about the WebIDL "enum" proposal is that the 
semantics of unspecified values is left to the binding, which makes it 
hard to generate consistent behaviour.
Received on Monday, 2 January 2012 07:57:12 UTC

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