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07 December 2009, 14:59

New version of JavaScript approved

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After 3 comes 5: The European Ecma industry association, the organisation responsible for standardising the JavaScript web language as well as JScript (Microsoft) and ActionScript (Adobe), has now approved ECMAScript version 5PDF. It has been long in the making; the most recent draft was proposed last spring. Ecma now intends to submit the standard to the ISO.

With 19 out of 21 votes, the overwhelming majority of voting members were in favour of the standard, but an email in Mozilla's ECMAScript discussion list said that those opposing the standard were the heavyweights IBM and Intel. IBM's reason for rejecting the proposal was content-related; it's unhappy with the lack of precision with decimals number handling. Intel, on the other hand, just didn't have enough time to check potential intellectual property implications.

With the new version, the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) developed by Douglas Crockford has become a component of ECMAScript. Developers can now also protect objects from being manipulated (Object.seal() and Object.freeze()). A new mode, "use strict", now makes the interpreter apply stricter rules: It will refuse to execute sloppy constructs such as undeclared variables (variables lacking a var definition).

Originally, version 3.1 was supposed to follow after version 3 of the standard. The members also discussed a version 4 at some point, but couldn't reach an agreement on it. This version would have contained such features as the namespaces that Adobe implemented for ActionScript. Those features are are not part of the newly approved version.

(djwm)

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