December 7, 2009, 6:59 am
After 3 comes 5: The European Ecma industry association, the organisation responsible for standardising the JavaScript web language as well as JScript (Microsoft) and ActionScript (Adobe), has now approved ECMAScript version 5PDF. It has been long in the making; the most recent draft was proposed last spring. Ecma now intends to submit the standard to the ISO.
With 19 out of 21 votes, the overwhelming majority of voting members were in favour of the standard, but an email in Mozilla’s ECMAScript discussion list said that those opposing the standard were the heavyweights IBM and Intel. IBM’s reason for rejecting the proposal was content-related; it’s unhappy with the lack of precision with decimals number handling. Intel, on the other hand, just didn’t have enough time to check potential intellectual property implications…
