Subj : Re: Rhino E4X bug or feature?
To   : netscape.public.mozilla.jseng
From : Olinda Spider
Date : Thu Jul 21 2005 03:40 pm

If I may be so bold, I think that in this case ECMA-357 is fine and the
Rhino implementation is at fault.

In the linked to bug report, you referred to ECMA-357 9.1.1.1 and
quoted:  "NOTE Unlike the internal Object [[Get]] method, the internal
XML [[Get]] method is never used for retrieving methods associated with
XML objects."  This is true, but this does not prevent being able to
call methods using XML objects.  If this was the case, then the
"xmlobject.function()" syntax would also not work.

ECMA-357 does alter the implementation of function calls as described
in 11.2.2.  Rhino currently does implement this behavior when
explicitly executated against an object, as in "xmlobject.function()".
But I see nothing in ECMA-357 that prohibits also applying this new
behavior to functions executed against the current scope.

In other words, right now the parser recognizes the difference between
accessing an object's property and accessing an object's method.  Given
the following two statements:

  var num = object.length()
  var element = object.length

The parser generates different opcodes for accessing each of the
"length" items.  Is there a reason the same parsing process can not be
applied to the following two statements?

  var num = length()
  var element = length

Pat

.