29.01.10

Humor

Tags: , , , , — Jeff @ 21:52
Fig
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(Image attribution: File:Fig.jpg by Fir0002, used under CC-BY-SA)

(I am aware this is almost hopelessly esoteric. I’ll say as a hint that p.m.o readers stand a far better-than-average chance of understanding this; the subset of those readers who are active web developers have an even better chance yet; and the subset of those who have been active since, oh, 19:13 PST today have the best chance of all. If you don’t get it [and who would blame you? 🙂 ], I’ll explain fully in the first comment.)

20.01.10

Glory

A glory, an optical phenomenon in which a circular rainbow appears on a background of water droplets when the sun is directly behind the observer
Glory and cloud horizon
Glory and cloud horizon
Glory and tip of plane wing
Glory and tip of plane wing
The glory, part of the plane wing, framed at bottom by the airplane window
A little further zoomed out
The glory and the plane wing, as the plane shadow begins to be visible
The glory and the plane wing, as the plane shadow begins to be visible
The glory just beneath the furthest hydraulic motor on the wing, with a brilliant blue sky above
The best of the glory pictures
The glory just underneath the wing, with the plane's shadow now unmistakable
After further descent the plane's shadow is now unmistakable
The glory, seen during mostly level flying (original video)
The glory and airplane shadow, seen during descent into the clouds (original video)

…all taken in the waning minutes of my flight from BOS→MSP yesterday, returning from MIT‘s Mystery Hunt to the Bay Area (following a long stretch of working and hacking on Mozilla remotely in areas which, in contrast to the Bay Area, have proper winter climes).

For more of this sort of thing, I highly recommend watching the famous “rainbow lecture” given by MIT’s Walter Lewin, the professor under whom I had the pleasure of taking 8.03. And yes, Walter Lewin is my homeboy.

15.01.10

More ES5 backwards-incompatible changes: regular expressions now evaluate to a new object, not the same object, each time they’re encountered

(preemptive clarification: coming in Firefox 3.7 and not Firefox 3.6, which is to say, a good half year away from now rather than Real Soon Now)

Disjunction: is /foo/ the same object, or a new object, each time it’s evaluated in ES3?

According to ECMA-262 3rd edition, what should this code print?

function getRegEx() { return /regex/; }
print("getRegEx() === getRegEx(): " + (getRegEx() === getRegEx()));

The answer depends upon this question: when a JavaScript regular expression literal is evaluated, does it create a new RegExp object each time, or does it evaluate to the exact same RegExp object each time it’s evaluated? Let’s look at a few examples and make a guess.

I sense a pattern

var tests =
  [
   function getNull() { return null; },
   function getNumber() { return 1; },
   function getString() { return "a"; },
   function getBoolean() { return false; },
   function getObject() { return {}; },
   function getArray() { return []; },
   function getFunction() { return function f(){}; },
  ];

for (var i = 0, sz = tests.length; i < sz; i++)
{
  var t = tests[i];
  print(t.name + "() === " + t.name + "(): " + (t() === t()));
}

If you test that code, you’ll see that the first four results are true, and the rest are false, all per ECMA-262 3rd edition. (Okay, technically, and bizarrely, ES3 permitted either result for the function case, but no browser ever implemented a result of true; ES5 acknowledges reality and mandates that the result be false.) The first four functions return primitive values; the last three return objects. There’s only a single instance of any primitive value — or, alternately, you might say, equality doesn’t distinguish between different instances of the same primitive. Therefore it doesn’t really matter whether primitive literals evaluate to new instances or the same instance. On the other hand, objects compare equal only if they’re the same object. Since the object cases didn’t compare identically, they must be new objects each time. This makes sense: if this were not the case, what would happen in the following example?

function makePoint(x, y)
{
  var pt = {};
  pt.x = x;
  pt.y = y;
  return pt;
}

var pt1 = makePoint(1, 2);
var pt2 = makePoint(3, 4);

It would be complete nonsense if the object literal above evaluated to the same object every time it were encountered; the next two lines would blow away the previous point, and we would have pt1.x ===3 && pt1.y === 4.

Plausible assertion: regular expression literals evaluate to new objects when encountered?

Returning to the original question, then, what does ES3 say this code should print?

function getRegEx() { return /regex/; }
print("getRegEx() === getRegEx(): " + (getRegEx() === getRegEx()));

A regular expression is an object. If you don’t want to get weird property-poisoning of the sort just suggested, regular expression literals must evaluate to different objects each time they’re encountered, right?

Alternative: ES3 says /foo/ is the same object every time

Wrong. According to ES3, there’s only a single object for each regular expression literal that’s returned each time the literal is encountered:

A regular expression literal is an input element that is converted to a RegExp object (section 15.10) when it is scanned. The object is created before evaluation of the containing program or function begins. Evaluation of the literal produces a reference to that object; it does not create a new object.

ECMA-262, 3rd ed. 7.8.5 Regular Expression Literals

This was originally a dubious optimization in the standard to avoid the “costly” creation of a regular expression object every time a literal would be encountered. It’s perhaps a little surprising that the same object is returned each time, but does it make a difference in real programs not written to demonstrate the quirk? Often it doesn’t matter. As a simple example, if (/^\d+$/.test(str)) { /* ... */ } executes identically either way, assuming RegExp.prototype.test is unmodified. The RegExp never escapes, and its use doesn’t depend on mutable state, so creating new objects each time doesn’t make a difference (other than negligibly, in speed).

Sometimes, however, the shared-object misoptimization does matter meaningfully: when a RegExp with mutable state is used in ways that depend on that state. Most regular expressions don’t store any state, so if the same RegExp object is used twice it’s no big deal. However, it can matter a lot for regular expressions specified with the global flag:

var s = "abcddeeefffffgggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh";
function next(s)
{
  var r = /(.)\1*/g;
  r.exec(s);
  return r.lastIndex;
}

var r = [];
for (var i =0; i < 8; i++)
  r.push(next(s));
print(r.join(", "));

Each time a regular expression with the global flag is used, its lastIndex property is updated with the index of the location in the matched string where matching should resume when the regular expression is next used. Thus, in this example we have mutable state, and if next is called multiple times we have uses which will depend on that mutable state. Let’s see what happens in engines which implemented regular expression literals per ES3. If you download the Firefox 3.6 release candidate and test the above code in it (adjusting the implied print to alert), the printed result will be this:

1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34

ES5: an escape to sanity

Is ES3’s behavior what you’d expect? No, it isn’t. In fact, ES3’s behavior, which Mozilla and SpiderMonkey implement, is the second-most duplicated bug filed against Mozilla’s JavaScript engine. SpiderMonkey and (strangely enough) v8 are the only notable JavaScript engines out there that implement ES3’s behavior. ES3’s behavior is rarely what web developers expect, and it doesn’t provide any real value, so ES5 is changing to the behavior you’d expect: evaluating a regular expression literal creates a new object every time.

Starting with Firefox 3.7, Firefox will implement what ES5 specifies. Download a Firefox nightly from nightly.mozilla.org and test it out as above (use the profile manager if you want to keep your current Firefox settings and install untouched). Instead of the Fibonacci sequence you’ll get this:

1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1

The bottom line

Starting with Firefox 3.7, evaluating a regular expression literal like /foo/ will create a new RegExp object, just as evaluating {} or [] currently creates a new object or array. The optimization ES3 specified has resulted in clear developer confusion and was misguided and inconsistent with respect to other object literal syntax in JavaScript.

Again, as with my previous post, we doubt this change will affect many scripts (in this case, except for the better). The fact that few browsers implemented ES3’s semantics means that most sites have to cope with either choice of semantics, so the semantics in ES5, implemented by Mozilla for Firefox 3.7, are likely already handled. Still, it’s possible that this change might break some sites (particularly those which include browser-specific code), so we’re giving a heads-up as early as possible.

12.01.10

More ES5 backwards-incompatible changes: the global properties undefined, NaN, and Infinity are now immutable

(preemptive clarification: coming in Firefox 3.7 and not Firefox 3.6, which is to say, a good half year away from now rather than Real Soon Now)

JavaScript and the undefined, Infinity, and NaN “keywords”

Consider the following JavaScript program: what do you think it does?

print("undefined before: " + undefined);
undefined = 17;
print("undefined after:  " + undefined);

The above program will print this output:

undefined before: undefined
undefined after:  17

Surely you can’t be serious!

A sane person might think that this program isn’t even a program. Doesn’t undefined always refer to the primitive value undefined? After all, this “program” isn’t one, nor would be the same one for true or false, mutatis mutandis:

print("null before: " + null);
null = 17; // !!! NullLiteral is not a LeftHandSideExpression
print("null after:  " + null);

I am serious…and don’t call me Shirley

Curiously, the program that assigns to undefined is a valid JavaScript program, but programs that assign to null, true, and false are not. Why not? The latter are all keywords with intrinsic meaning within the language; undefined, on the other hand, is just a normal property of the global object. According to ECMA-262 3rd edition, if you assign a different value to undefined, that different value becomes the new value of undefined.

This is a clear botch in ES3. undefined should have been a keyword in JavaScript from the beginning; similarly, the global properties Infinity and NaN probably should have been keywords as well (or perhaps the properties should not have existed, given that Math.Infinity and Math.NaN exist and are immutable). ECMA-262 5th edition doesn’t quite go so far as to change these three properties into keywords due to backwards compatibility concerns (making that change would be guaranteed to break any programs that even tried to assign to those names, regardless whether the program relied on that assignment for correctness). Instead, it changes these properties to be read-only, in the same way that the various numeric properties on the Math object are read-only. Assigning to these properties in ES5 won’t do anything (unless you opt into strict mode, in which case a TypeError exception will be thrown after we fix bug 537873), but at least it won’t definitely and completely break existing programs that relied on this.

We’ve made this change in SpiderMonkey, and it is now in trunk builds of Firefox, slated for the eventual Firefox 3.7 release. Download a nightly build from nightly.mozilla.org and test out the change for yourself (use the profile manager if you want to keep your current Firefox settings and install untouched). This change should have no effect on the vast, vast majority of web developers who don’t try to change the values of these properties; as for the [civility and my religion require I redact this description] developers who did change the value of the global undefined, NaN, or Infinity properties, well…you had it coming.

The bottom line

The global properties undefined, Infinity, and NaN will be read-only and immutable in Firefox 3.7. Assigning to these properties will do nothing (except in strict mode where a TypeError exception will be thrown once we fix a bug) rather than changing their values. This shouldn’t break the vast, vast, vast majority of scripts out there — but there’s no way to guarantee it will break no one, so we think it’s worth announcing this backwards-incompatible change as proactively as possible.

03.01.10

Haircuts for job hunters?

I can think of no stronger an argument to the average person for sweeping United States tax simplification and reform than this video (a variation of which I saw while watching the Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day — a game which, to be honest, was almost sickeningly boring after the first half):

Is a haircut a job-hunting expense?

Do you know the answer to the question the video poses under the current tax system? Answering the question is left as an exercise for the reader; it’d take me more effort to find out the answer than I’m willing to make. Good luck reading IRS documentation to figure out the answer! (Food for thought: which segments of society are most likely to know or learn about, and take advantage of, this deduction, particularly given that it requires itemizing deductions, among other restrictions? What classes of society benefit most and least?)

It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.

James Madison, The Federalist No. 62

Instead, consider the answer under the far simpler Hall-Rabushka flat tax, occupying a single postcard-sized form (plus one for your company if you’re self-employed): the question is meaningless. Whether you get the haircut for personal pleasure or for job-search reputability, it wouldn’t affect your income tax in the slightest. More generally, an individual’s income taxes under the flat tax don’t depend at all on how he spends his money. (See Section 202, referencing Section 201 and Section 101; the law’s text, also linked from the above page, fits in seven nearly pocket-sized pages, so it’s easy to navigate it and only slightly less easy to understand its requirements. Analysis and understanding of its rationales is more difficult but is well within the grasp of an intelligent taxpayer with a numerical bent.)

In the meantime, Congress, please keep preserving the existing tax system and even making it more convoluted, complex, and distortionary — taxpayers love you for it!