Tuesday, February 21, 2006

ECMA-262 Edition 4

As Brendan Eich announced yesterday, I've been invited to join Mozilla and ECMA in the process of defining and specifying the next version of JavaScript--erm, EcmaScript. Brendan kindly refers to me as an "expert" (for which I've heard no end of snickers from my colleagues--thanks guys), but I expect to learn a lot from this experience. I just met the Mozilla and ECMA guys last week, and they seem great to work with.

I'm really excited about the marriage of formal methods and practical application. I love to see this kind of cooperation between research and industry. At a minimum, the PL community's knowledge about formal specification should help the committee with its goal of making the spec clear and precise. We are actually hoping to see some correctness proofs as well--e.g., type and contract soundness. And I'm keeping my eyes peeled for other useful consistency properties worth verifying.

Sorry about the silence lately. Now that the word's out, I hope to talk more about some of the interesting points that come up in the EcmaScript process.

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