February 1999 Draft
JavaScript 2.0
Types
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Wednesday, February 17, 1999

Type Declarations

Primitive Types

The following primitive types are predefined in JavaScript 2.0:

Type

Values

void undefined
null_t null
boolean   true and false
byte Integers between -128 and 127 inclusive
ubyte Integers between 0 and 255 inclusive
short Integers between -32768 and 32767 inclusive
ushort Integers between 0 and 65535 inclusive
int Integers between -2147483648 and 2147483647 inclusive
uint Integers between 0 and 4294967295 inclusive
long Integers between -9223372036854775808 and 9223372036854775807 inclusive
ulong Integers between 0 and 18446744073709551615 inclusive
integer All integers (of arbitrary size)
float Single-precision IEEE floating-point numbers, including positive and negative zeroes and infinities and NaN
double Double-precision IEEE floating-point numbers, including positive and negative zeroes and infinities and NaN
real Any integer or double
string Immutable strings of unicode characters
funct Any function or method
type Any type
any Any value

Integers are distinct values from floating-point numbers. A literal number that contains a decimal point or exponent is considered to be a floating-point number; otherwise it's an integer. This distinction does not matter much to most scripts because integers and floating-point numbers coerce freely to each other, but there are subtle differences between integers and floating-point numbers in the handling of negative zero and values beyond ±253.

The above type names are not reserved words. They become available at the top level once a script imports the Types library.

User-Defined Types

Any class defined using the class declaration is also a type that denotes the set of all of its and its descendants' instances. These include the predefined classes, so Object, Date, etc. are all types. Note that null is not an instance of any class.

Compound Types

We can use the following operators to construct more complex types. t is a type expression in the expressions below.

Type   Values
t ! null or any value of type t
t ~ undefined or any value of type t
t [] any array of values of type t

In addition to the above, a type expression can use any value operators. Except for parentheses, most of them are not very useful, though.

Subtyping

We write a b to denote that a is a subtype of b. Subtyping is transitive, so if a b and b c then a c is also true. Subtyping is also reflexive: a a.

The following subtype relations hold on the basic types:

byte short int long integer
ubyte ushort uint ulong integer
ubyte short
ushort int
uint long
integer real
float double real
c Object for any class c
c d for any class c and subclass d of c
t any for any type t
t~ void for any type t
t! null_t for any type t

Every other subtype relation can be derived from the above by applying the transitivity and reflexivity rules.

We write v t to indicate that v is a value that is a member of type t. The following subtyping rule holds: if v t and t s, then v s holds as well. Thus any particular value v is simultaneously a member of many types.

A JavaScript 2.0 value does not have an intrinsic most specific type -- one can ask whether the value v is a member of a given type t, but this does not prevent the value v from also being a member of some unrelated type s. For example, 3 is a member of type byte as well as type ubyte, but neither byte nor ubyte is a subtype of the other. Thus it is meaningless to talk about the type of a value -- a value has many types.

On the other hand, a variable does have a particular type. If one declares a variable x of type byte, then whatever value is held in x is guaranteed to have type byte, and one can assign any value of type byte to x.

Operations on Types

Types are generally used to restrict the set of objects that can be held in a variable or passed as a function argument. For example, the declaration

var integer x;

restricts the values that can be held in variable x to be integers.

A type declaration never affects the semantics of reading the variable or accessing one of its members. Thus, as long as expression new MyType() returns a value of type MyType, the following two code snippets are equivalent:

var MyType x = new MyType();
x.foo();
var x = new MyType();
x.foo();

This equivalence always holds, even if these snippets are inside the declaration of class MyType and foo is a private field of that class. As a corollary, adding true type annotations does not change the meaning of a program.

Type Expressions

A type is also a value (whose type is type) and can be used in expressions, assigned to variables, passed to functions, etc. For example, the code

const type Z = integer;
function abs_val(Z i) Z {
  return i<0 ? -i : i;
}

is equivalent to:

function abs_val(integer i) integer {
  return i<0 ? -i : i;
}

As another example, the following method takes a type and returns an instance of that type:

method QueryInterface(type t) t { ... }

Type Coercions

Coercions can take place in the following situations:

In any of these cases, if v t, then v is passed unchanged. However, if v t, then v is sometimes coerced to type t. The following coercions are predefined:

t v Result
byte, ubyte v integer The unique integer w t that satisfies the congruence w = v (mod 256)
short, ushort   v integer The unique integer w t that satisfies the congruence w = v (mod 65536)
int, uint v integer The unique integer w t that satisfies the congruence w = v (mod 4294967296)
long, ulong v integer The unique integer w t that satisfies the congruence w = v (mod 264)
t integer   v double If v has no fractional part, v is reinterpreted as an integer. ±0.0 become the integer 0.
If v has a fractional part or is ± or a NaN, the coercion fails.
float, double   v integer The floating-point number w t mathematically closest to v using IEEE round-to-nearest semantics. 0 becomes +0.0.
float   v double The floating-point number w t mathematically closest to v using IEEE round-to-nearest semantics.
null_t   undefined null
boolean   undefined false
t integer   undefined 0
t double   undefined +0.0
string   undefined ""

If several coercions apply, the one earlier in the list is selected (this will not happen unless some language extension defines a type that multiply inherits from several predefined types).

Type Casts

A type cast performs more aggressive transformations than a type coercion. To cast a value to a given type, we use the type as a function, passing it the value as an argument:

type(value)

For example, byte(258.1) returns the byte 2, and string(2+2==4) returns the string "true".

Need to specify the semantics of type casts. They are intended to mimic the current ToNumber, ToString, etc. methods.


Waldemar Horwat
Last modified Wednesday, February 17, 1999
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