Inherited Privileged Members

[Michael Haufe-2]

The strawman articles on Object Initialisers look very promising (http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:object_initialiser_extensions), but one issue I didn't see discussed is a solution to enable the inheritance of privileged members. Currently developers have to redefine accessor properties and methods on every constructor call to maintain a reference to the instance private variables. Ex:

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function Foo(name, value){
    // assume there was argument validation of some form.
    var _name = name,
         _value = value;

    this.__defineGetter__("name", function(){
        return _name;
    });
    this.__defineSetter__("name", function(v){
        //[snip] argument validation
        _name = v;
    });
    this.__defineGetter__("value", function(){
        return _value;
    });
    this.__defineSetter__("value", function(v){
        //[snip] argument validation
        _value= v;
    });
    this.toString = function(){
         return _name + ":" + _value";
    }
}

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This approach can obviously leads to a potentially large amount of memory consumption. One workaround I've discovered to solve this issue is a pattern like the following:

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var Foo = (function(){
    var _refs = [],
        _props = [],
        _private = {
        get : function(o,n){
            var i = _refs.indexOf(o);
            return ~i ? _props[i][n] : undefined;
        },
        set : function(o,n,v){
            var i = _refs.indexOf(o);
            if(~i)
                _props[i][n] = v;

            var len = _refs.length;
            _refs[len] = o;
            _props[len] = {};
            _props[len][n] = v;
        }
    };

    function Foo(name, value){
        _private.set(this, "name", name);
        _private.set(this, "value", value);
    }

    Foo.prototype = {
        get name(){
            return _private.get(this, "name");
        },
        set name(v){
            _private.set(this, "name", v);
        },
        get value(){
            return _private.get(this, "value");
        },
        set value(v){
            _private.set(this, "value", v);
        },
        toString : function(){
            return _private.get(this,"name") + ":" + _private.get(this, "value")
        }
    }

    return Foo;
})();

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The verbosity is apparent. Has there been any discussion with Object Initialisers related to this type of problem?

Respectfully,

Michael Haufe

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[Waldemar Horwat]

This proliferation of little function objects is one of the things that the various class proposals are addressing.

    Waldemar
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