Most programming languages have keywords or reserved words: names which can’t be used to name variables. Keywords have special meaning, so using them as variable names would conflict with such use. Reserved words are keywords of the future: names which might eventually be given special meaning, so they can’t be used now to ease future adoption.

JavaScript and the ECMAScript standard that underlie it historically have had an excessively large set of keywords and reserved words “inherited” from Java. ES5 partially loosened ES3‘s past keyword restrictions. For example, byte, char, and int were reserved in ES3 but aren’t in ES5.

Many years ago, before work started on ECMAScript after ES3, a few browsers stopped reserving all of ES3’s reserved words. In response browsers generally started to un-reserve many of these names. As it turned out this un-reservation went too far: ES5 un-reserved many of these words, but it didn’t un-reserve all of them. In particular, while some implementations un-reserved the names class, enum, export, extends, import, and super, ES5 did not.

Firefox un-reserved these names then along with some other browsers. But as ES5 corrects the over-reservation of ES3 without un-reserving these names, we are moving to align with ES5 by re-reserving class, enum, export, extends, import, and super in all code. (Firefox 4 reserves these names only in strict mode code.)

You can experiment with a version of Firefox with these changes by downloading a TraceMonkey nightly build. Trunk’s still locked down for Firefox 4, so it hasn’t picked up these changes just yet. (Don’t forget to use the profile manager if you want to keep the settings you use with your primary Firefox installation pristine.)

Bug databases track issues at several levels.

There’s the level of the specific problem. For example: this sequences of graphics calls causes a crash.

Then there’s the level of the meta-bug: a bug tracking a number of different issues in some genre. For example, there might be a bug tracking, say, crashes involving some particular feature: graphics drawing functionality, for example. In Bugzilla this is known as a “meta-bug”, because it isn’t really a bug but rather a bug about bugs. In b.m.o such bugs are given the meta keyword.

Last, there’s the level consisting of bugs which track meta-bugs. For example, you might have a bug tracking a bug for crashes involving graphics drawing functionality, a bug for rendering glitches involving graphics drawing functionality, a bug for unimplemented functionality in the specification, a bug for performance problems involving graphics drawing functionality, and a bug tracking progress at investigating the relative stability of graphics functionality run on hardware with various graphics cards and driver versions. The logical progression is to call this a “meta-meta-bug”.

Therefore, shouldn’t Bugzilla have a meta-meta keyword to associate with such bugs? But let’s not be over-hasty: let’s have a fair discussion first. Perhaps people should comment or blog about this idea a bit. What do readers think?

Callable regular expressions

Way back in the day when Netscape implemented regular expressions in JavaScript, it made them callable. If you slapped an argument list after a regular expression, it’d act as if you called RegExp.prototype.exec on it with the provided arguments.

var r = /abc/, res;

res = r("abc");
assert(res.length === 1);

res = r("def");
assert(res === null);

Why? Beats me. I’d have thought .exec was easy enough to type and clearer to boot, myself. Hopefully readers familiar with the history can explain in comments.

Problems

Callable regular expressions present one immediate problem to a “naive” implementation: their behavior with typeof. According to ECMAScript, the typeof for any object which is callable should be "function", and Netscape and Mozilla for a long time faithfully implemented this. This tended to cause much confusion in practice, so browsers that implemented callable regular expressions eventually changed typeof to arguably “lie” for regular expressions and return "object". In SpiderMonkey the “fix” was an utterly inelegant hack which distinguished callables as either regular expressions or not, to determine typeof behavior.

Past this, callable regular expressions complicate implementing callability and optimizations of it. Implementations supporting getters and setters (once purely as an extension, now standardized in ES5) must consider the case where the getter or setter is a regular expression and do something appropriate. And of course they must handle regular old calls, qualified (/a/()) and unqualified (({ p: /a/ }).p()) both. Mozilla’s had a solid trickle of bugs involving callable regular expressions, almost always filed as a result of Jesse‘s evil fuzzers (and not due to actual sites breaking).

It’s also hard to justify callable regular expressions as an extension. While ECMAScript explicitly permits extensions, it generally prefers extensions to be new methods or properties of existing objects. Regular expression callability is neither of these: instead it’s adding an internal hook to regular expressions to make them callable. This might not technically be contrary to the spec, but it goes against its spirit.

Regular expressions won’t be callable in Firefox 5

No one’s ever really used callable regular expressions. They’re non-standard, not all browsers implement them, and they unnecessarily complicate implementations. So, in concert with other browser engines like WebKit, we’re making regular expressions non-callable in Firefox 5. (Regular expressions are callable in Firefox 4, but of course don’t rely on this.)

You can experiment with a version of Firefox with these changes by downloading a TraceMonkey nightly build. Trunk’s still locked down for Firefox 4, so it won’t pick up the change until Firefox 4 branches and trunk reopens for changes targeted at the next release. (Don’t forget to use the profile manager if you want to keep the settings you use with your primary Firefox installation pristine.)