Path: csiph.com!newsfeed.hal-mli.net!feeder3.hal-mli.net!newsfeed.hal-mli.net!feeder1.hal-mli.net!border3.nntp.dca.giganews.com!Xl.tags.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.earthlink.com!news.earthlink.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 06 Dec 2012 10:37:44 -0600 Date: Thu, 06 Dec 2012 08:37:16 -0800 From: Patricia Shanahan User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.2; WOW64; rv:16.0) Gecko/20121026 Thunderbird/16.0.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.javascript Subject: Re: Maintainer of the FAQ References: <46247081-75ce-430c-8319-459ddcdf17fe@bx4g2000vbb.googlegroups.com> <1868da91-d142-49ee-8b09-27c0983c1af4@a2g2000yqh.googlegroups.com> <2ae76e56-b811-4601-be70-3acfe1bfea19@m4g2000yqf.googlegroups.com> In-Reply-To: <2ae76e56-b811-4601-be70-3acfe1bfea19@m4g2000yqf.googlegroups.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: Lines: 46 X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 70.230.205.210 X-Trace: sv3-Z8i3+jVKA+lGCSnWUAuSXxnmj4TxwUVmkzbun4kI7LzGZ0ZGuCmyR86ldiiCUbVtG0xYtq/SQfuGUOI!VetcDrhVwf0VHmM21KLsamH5dQych/wh4r4qw6Cn7UyZ+qMVhCpyhoIg9uqL19bAzV69+zUlck/t!zy5Jv1Q7QvlncVOXJ3GOUReMbboS/v65NjBkLR/BgiL+8Ww= X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 X-Original-Bytes: 3928 Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.javascript:17520 On 12/6/2012 7:11 AM, Scott Sauyet wrote: > Patricia Shanahan wrote: > >> So far, I have found no practical use for the information that the >> standard name is ECMAScript. It has not been relevant to any decision >> I've needed to make. I expect sooner or later I'll find it useful, but >> it was not high on the list of things I really needed to know to get >> started programming in JavaScript. > > I am not one of those who has been stressing that point; quite the > opposite, I would say. But I hope that is not what you heard from > those making the point. It's not really a matter of the name. The > main point being made is that there is no single language here, but a > group of languages that to a greater or lesser degree adhere to the > standard published by Ecma International. For a great deal of our > discussion the differences between these related languages makes no > practical difference. But there are times when the differences can > become critical. > > I personally have no issue signaling those specific cases where the > implementation makes a difference and only then being very precise > about which versions of Microsoft's JScript, Mozilla's JavaScript, or > whichever ECMAScript implementation are under discussion, choosing at > other times to revert to the common usage of "Javascript". But I > doubt even the most zealous advocates of the "There is no Javascript" > position are particularly worried about the name "ECMAScript". The problem with this position is that there are major dialect differences between e.g. what IE 8 supports and what IE 9 supports, with no change of language name. For that reason, it never occurred to me that insistence on not calling Javascript "Javascript" had anything at all to do with the critical issue of dialect differences. I was well aware of dialect differences before I came to this newsgroup, just from reading a book that consistently calls the language "JavaScript", but that includes the information I need when deciding whether to use a feature - which versions of which browsers support it, and any incompatibilities and variations between them. From a dialect point of view, saying "There is no Javascript" makes as much, and as little, sense to me as saying "There is no Fortran". The Javascript dialects have as much in common as e.g. VMS Fortran and Fortran 90. Patricia