304915 - suggestions for additional javascript functionality

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: JavaScript Engine, enhancement)

Description

[Felipe]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6

While functions are being added to SpiderMonkey, I thought of some ideas for new
extras:

-------------------
Array.prototype.sortBy: sorts an array by the output of a function to be mapped
onto the array. This also allows multi-level sorts: pass two or more functions
as parameters. Sort descending by assigning a "reverse" property to a function
passed as a parameter.

Array.prototype.combine: use "this" array as keys to a new Object, with an array
passed as a parameter used as values.

Date.prototype.format: UNIX date format. Right now, formatting dates in
javascript is really cumbersome.

Date.prototype.addInterval: Similar to MySQL's way of doing this.

Object.prototype.keys
Object.prototype.values: Both of these are pretty self-explanatory.
------------------

I've got implementations (in javascript) of all these up at the bug's URL.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[PikeUK]

->Core: JS Engine

Comment 2

[Brendan Eich [:brendan]]

We should have a wiki-based process for fielding suggested additions.  The
ruby.js stuff is cool too, but we can't build all the suggested extensions in,
nor should we -- rather, we should include the necessary primitives, plus common
cliches and customs, and let the rest arise via a "JSAN" effort.

/be

Comment 3

[Felipe]

....except in ruby.js, they implement a lot of Object extensions by extending
the constructor's prototype. This is dangerous in Javascript, where the way to
iterate through an Object is

for (var key in someObj) {...}

....which, when I've tried extending the prototype, places the new prototype
members into this iteration. This actually caused extending Array.prototype to
break Dean Edwards's IE7 script until he got rid of "var i in someArray".

I'm all for a JSAN effort; the ideal would seem to be a service where, say, you
can request a JS file that has (for example) Array.prototype.sortBy, and it
spits back a file with that function plus any dependencies.

Comment 4

[Tom S [:evilpie]]

We generally prefer using Ecma for this nowadays. Object.keys is a thing \o/