Prepending a decoration might work. I’d probably pick something like “_as3_”
rather than “AS3” for the reason that it looks more like a prepend to the name
and it makes the unlikely chance that someone has an element with the prepended
namespace even more unlikely.
defineProperty with one extra index might work. I’ll give that a go…
On Nov 12, 2015, at 11:18 PM, Alex Harui <aha...@adobe.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 11/12/15, 12:48 PM, "Harbs" <harbs.li...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> What I mean was that the dynamic object structure could be a property of
>> XML rather than being XML itself.
>>
>> So the API would be XML which would have all the necessary functions, but
>> it would keep a living structure as a separate dynamic object.
>>
>> If the compiler could modify all delete operator calls on XML properties
>> to the corresponding dynamic object within, that might solve this issue.
>
> I’m worried that proxy-ing properties to an internal object will result in
> performance problems, bloat the code, make it harder to debug on the JS
> side (should you need to). Having properties on the XML instance itself
> would probably let code run correctly where we didn’t know it was XML (and
> thought it was Object).
>
> I just noticed that in Flash, the XML methods are in the AS3 namespace,
> which is why they don’t collide with the child “name” tag. I think it
> might be easier to catch that the function call resolved to that namespace
> and prepend a decoration on the function name.
>
> Then you would write your XML class as:
>
> public class XML()
> {
> public function AS3name():XMLList
> {
> ..
> }
> }
>
>>
>> Regarding #2: Yes. It’s probably possible to substitute writing to
>> XMLList to modifying XML instead, changing XMLList is VERY common, and if
>> we’re trying to accommodate existing code, there’s going to be lots of
>> bad code. It’s also almost always easier to write to XMLList than it is
>> to XML. Another part of the problem is that I think a lot of folks don’t
>> have the distinction between XMLList and XML clear in certai use cases.
>> This is especially true because single item XMLLists almost always behave
>> as if they are XML objects.
>
> Well, if you find the defineProperties trick acceptable, I think it would
> work in most of these cases.
>
> Thoughts?
> -Alex
>
