Re: Idle musings on doing E over again

On 10/1/12 at 18:38, [email protected] (Kevin Reid) wrote:

>>The ideas represented by E would have a bigger impact if they were embedded into a popular
>language, especially if that happens before major adoption of the host language occurs.
>
>The main idea represented by E, object-capability security, has 
>been embedded into ECMAScript 5 (essentially JavaScript); with 
>a relatively simple initialization library, known as SES 
>(Secure ECMAScript), in a modern (sufficiently 
>standards-conformant) browser, you can convert any web page's 
>scripting environment into a capability system. Certainly it is 
>not “before major adoption”, but Mark Miller feels that 
>this is the most important direction currently for practical adoption.
>
>I'm talking about / sketching out this new-E idea not because I 
>think pushing caps-in-ES5 is not the right option, but because 
>I think it is important to continue the research project that E 
>has been, and because I like E itself as a language -- it just 
>needs some tweaking.

I would add promises and vat concurrency control to the list of 
main ideas of E. Of the minor ideas, my favorite is quasi-literals.

Javascript already has vat concurrency control, and when people 
suggest putting in thread-like features, they receive 
significant pushback.

Promises can be added by libraries, but it is nice to have 
language-level syntax.

Quasi-literals are proposed for future Javascript standardization.

Cheers - Bill

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