April 2002 Draft JavaScript 2.0 Compatibility

Tuesday, October 9, 2001

JavaScript 2.0 is intended to be upwards compatible with almost all JavaScript 1.5 and earlier scripts. The following are the current compatibility issues:

• Commas are now significant inside brackets, so expr[expr, expr] should be replaced by expr[(expr, expr)].
• The postincrement and postdecrement operators return the value of the operand rather than the value of the operand converted to a number. The code var s = "5"; var y = s++ will store "5" in y instead of 5. The new value of s is still 6, just as in JavaScript 1.5.
• Uses of the identifiers as, is, namespace, and use need to be renamed or escaped with \_ because these are now reserved words.
• JavaScript 2.0 drops the wrapper classes Boolean, Number, and String. Boolean, Number, and String now refer to classes that have primitive booleans, numbers, and strings as instances. The methods of these new classes correspond to the methods of JavaScript 1.5’s wrapper classes. The results of calling new on Boolean, Number, or String are now implementation-defined, so an implementation may choose to retain the wrappers for compatibility with JavaScript 1.5, but it is not required to do so.
• JavaScript 2.0 permits but does not require implementations to allow array indices greater than 4294967295. Code that relies on indices greater than 4294967295 not being recognized as valid array indices may not work.
• Code that modifies the standard JavaScript 1.5 objects such as Object and String may not work.
• JavaScript 2.0 defines additional global constants, which may clash with top-level identifiers in programs.
• Invalid JavaScript 1.5 code may parse as valid JavaScript 2.0 code. JavaScript 1.5 programs which relied on getting an exception for such formerly invalid code may not work.

For applications such as browsers where 100% compatibility is needed, scripts will be assumed to be written JavaScript 1.5 unless explicitly marked as being JavaScript 2.0 through either an HTML or XML attribute or by including a use ecmascript(4) or use javascript(2)statement.

Waldemar Horwat Last modified Tuesday, October 9, 2001