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Bug 22156 - Allow trailing commas in Web IDL lists
Summary: Allow trailing commas in Web IDL lists
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: WebAppsWG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: WebIDL (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All All
: P2 enhancement
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Cameron McCormack
QA Contact: public-webapps-bugzilla
URL:
Whiteboard: [v1]
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2013-05-24 06:00 UTC by Nils Barth
Modified: 2016-02-24 21:18 UTC (History)
6 users (show)

See Also:


Attachments

Description Nils Barth 2013-05-24 06:00:43 UTC
Could we allow trailing commas in Web IDL?

Trailing commas are desired by many stylistically (for consistency and clearer diffs), and also make automated output of lists easier.

Further, trailing commas being not allowed are a frequent cause of syntax errors, notably in ECMAScript 3 and in JSON.

I've just been fixing trailing commas in Chromium; this is fiddly to fix and many developers would prefer that trailing commas be allowed. Relevant bug:
Chromium 242800
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=242800

Hixie also suggested this over at
Bug 21589 - SelectionMode enum should not have a trailing comma
...in Comment 2:
https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=21589#c2

Concretely, I think we just need to replace
[[
| ε
]]
with
[[
| ","
| ε
]]
...in any production rule for the tail of a list.

Alternatively, we could add a "CommaOrNone" rule:
[[
CommaOrNone → ","
            | ε
]]

So long as the tail of the list can't be empty, this does not introduce any ambiguity.

Looking at the grammar
http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/WebIDL/#idl-grammar
...I see the following rules for tails of lists:
[[
[22]	EnumValues
[36]	Identifiers
[54]	Arguments
[62]	ExtendedAttributes
]]
...and in all cases the tail current must be non-empty, so allowing trailing commas would be ok.

Of these, [62] ExtendedAttributes and [22] EnumValues seem the most important cases, as these are often rather long vertical lists, but for consistency it seems best to allow a trailing comma for any of these.

For reference, ES5 added support for trailing commas (though ES3 did not allow them, and this is a very common cause of errors), and JSON does not allow trailing commas, while many languages allow them (C, Java, Python).

References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coding_conventions#Lists
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7246618/trailing-commas-in-javascript
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/201782/can-you-use-a-trailing-comma-in-a-json-object

ES3 and ES5 spec:
ES3:
[[
 ObjectLiteral :
    { }
    { PropertyNameAndValueList }
]]

ES5:
[[
 ObjectLiteral :
    { }
    { PropertyNameAndValueList }
    { PropertyNameAndValueList , }
]]
Comment 1 Nils Barth 2013-05-24 06:39:15 UTC
This subsumes the bug:
Bug 17508 - Let enum lists end with a comma
...which is only about enums.
Comment 2 Cameron McCormack 2013-08-04 07:53:59 UTC
Trailing commas for enums were allowed in the other bug, but I'm not doing it for extended attributes unless there is more demand.
Comment 3 Nils Barth 2013-08-05 06:16:23 UTC
Thanks Cameron - understood.

In Chromium (specifically Blink) we have high demand for trailing commas on
extended attributes, due to using them extensively in the bindings, but if
these aren't widely used outside of Chromium, I understand not having it in
the spec (we can have a dialect difference).

If other users turn out to use these, we can revisit the issue,
otherwise ok with WONTFIX.
Comment 4 Tab Atkins Jr. 2013-08-05 17:13:59 UTC
(In reply to comment #2)
> Trailing commas for enums were allowed in the other bug, but I'm not doing
> it for extended attributes unless there is more demand.

It's pretty bizarre if a language allows trailing commas in *some* comma-separated syntax constructs, but not others.
Comment 5 Cameron McCormack 2013-08-06 01:07:14 UTC
(In reply to comment #4)
> (In reply to comment #2)
> > Trailing commas for enums were allowed in the other bug, but I'm not doing
> > it for extended attributes unless there is more demand.
> 
> It's pretty bizarre if a language allows trailing commas in *some*
> comma-separated syntax constructs, but not others.

Not unheard of that only some comma-separated syntax constructs in a language allow a trailing comma.  In JS [1,2,] is fine yet function(a,b,){} isn't. *shrug*
Comment 6 Michael Ficarra 2014-12-01 20:22:44 UTC
Note that the JS trailing comma inconsistency argument will be invalid in ES7, after the following proposal makes its way through the committee: https://github.com/jeffmo/es-trailing-function-commas

I also support this feature request. It is odd that trailing commas are allowed in some contexts and not others. Is there any argument against this feature other than "I'm not doing it"?