Versions
There are five editions of ECMA-262 published. Work on a future edition, codenamed "Harmony", is in progress.
| Edition | Date published | Changes from prior edition | Editor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | June 1997 | First edition | Guy L. Steele, Jr. |
| 2 | June 1998 | Editorial changes to keep the specification fully aligned with ISO/IEC 16262 international standard | Mike Cowlishaw |
| 3 | December 1999 | Added regular expressions, better string handling, new control statements, try/catch exception handling, tighter definition of errors, formatting for numeric output and other enhancements | Mike Cowlishaw |
| 4 | Abandoned | Fourth Edition was abandoned, due to political differences concerning language complexity. Many features proposed for the Fourth Edition have been completely dropped; some are proposed for ECMAScript Harmony. | |
| 5 | December 2009 | Adds "strict mode", a subset intended to provide more thorough error checking and avoid error-prone constructs. Clarifies many ambiguities in the 3rd edition specification, and accommodates behaviour of real-world implementations that differed consistently from that specification. Adds some new features, such as getters and setters, library support for JSON, and more complete reflection on object properties. | Pratap Lakshman, Allen Wirfs-Brock |
| 5.1 | June 2011 | This edition 5.1 of the ECMAScript Standard is fully aligned with third edition of the international standard ISO/IEC 16262:2011 | Pratap Lakshman, Allen Wirfs-Brock |
| Harmony | Work in progress. | Version 6 is rumored to have support for classes, a concept long supported by languages like Java, C++ and C#, in addition to multiple new concepts and language features. |
In June 2004, Ecma International published ECMA-357 standard, defining an extension to ECMAScript, known as ECMAScript for XML (E4X).
Ecma also defined a "Compact Profile" for ECMAScript — known as ES-CP, or ECMA 327 — which is designed for resource-constrained devices. Several of the dynamic features of ECMAScript (such as the eval function) are made optional, thus allowing the runtime to make more assumptions about the behaviour of programs and therefore make more performance trade-offs when running the code. The HD DVD standard was one place where the ECMAScript Compact Profile was used in favour of full ECMAScript to reduce processing and memory needs on devices.
Read more about this topic: ECMAScript
Famous quotes containing the word versions:
“The assumption must be that those who can see value only in tradition, or versions of it, deny man’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances.”
—Stephen Bayley (b. 1951)