[parenscript-devel] New patch that adds real lexical scoping and maybe breaks your code

[Daniel Gackle]

Whoa. I've just had a chance to look at this lexical scoping business. This
is a major change, and needs a vigorous discussion. I'm not convinced that
the benefits outweigh the costs.

All local variables in our JS are now mangled by having a gensym-style
suffix added to them. This considerably degrades the readability of the JS.
One of the PS design goals has always been to balance nice abstractions at
the source level with readability, ease of debugging, and efficiency in the
generated code. This is a must-have because PS is not a compiler where you
can just forget about the object code; those of us using PS on real projects
have our hands immersed in the generated JS every day. I spend a great deal
of time in Firebug, debugging and tracing and testing our code in the
browser, and anything that degrades readability is a real drag.

Against that cost, what is the benefit? I agree that it is a cool hack that
gets lexical scoping into PS without resorting to nasty things like try
blocks or nested lambdas. But I don't think that's a sufficient argument for
putting it into PS. What's the practical benefit? Has anyone expressed a
need for this feature? We've written many thousands of lines of PS code and
not run into a need for it that I can recall.

One option that won't work for us is to replace all usages of LET with VAR.
A lot of our code is written in a subset of CL that is also emitted as PS.
We can't throw out LET from that code. I suppose I could redefine PS's LET
to just prepend a bunch of VAR statements to the block. It would be an
unfortunate workaround, though.

I'm not saying I'm adamantly opposed to this change, just that it's a major
one that has some drawbacks. I think it ought to be discussed and debated.
The pros and cons are not all obvious, and need to be flushed out.

I'll post separately about a bug that seems to have been introduced. If that
bug (and a few others) can be fixed, I'm willing to give this latest PS a
try for a few weeks, as long as there's an alternative (short of regressing
to an old version) to fall back on.

Dan






This is a major change. I think there needs to be a vigorous discussion
about it. I'm not at all convinced that the benefits outweigh the costs, and


mangling, debugging, readability
obfuscation/minification


On Sun, May 3, 2009 at 3:40 PM, Vladimir Sedach <vsedach at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I just pushed a patch into the repository that may break existing
> code. Here is the patch description:
>
>    Implemented LET and LET* by variable renaming, which provides the
>    correct scoping semantics, and simplifies both the producing and the
>    produced code.
>
>    Removed the "." and "[]" name-mangling conventions from
>    symbol-to-js-string. Any code that uses symbols such as "foo.bar[baz]"
>    will now issue a warning, and needs to be rewritten to use standard
>    Lisp accessors. This is needed for variable renaming to work, and is
>    an extension of the patch that eliminated the ".method" method-calling
>    convention.
>
>    Thanks to Daniel Gackle and Dough Hoyte for opening my eyes to this
>    technique, which was right in front of me all along.
>
> This is a win-win situation for everyone involved (yes, even if it
> breaks your code, think of it as an opportunity for refactoring).
>
> With this patch Parenscript is finally rid of the evil symbol-abuse
> conventions, which IMO is the only thing from the original design of
> Parenscript that can in retrospect be called a mistake.
>
> Let me know what you guys think.
>
> Thank you,
> Vladimir
>
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