Naming bikeshed: "immutable"

[ljharb]

I think the word "immutable" is sufficiently overloaded that it'd cause confusion to use it.

All primitives are immutable, but so are frozen objects without internal slots that have no "non-immutable object" properties.

I'd love to gather suggestions of alternate names that can convey "produces Records and Tuples instead of Objects and Arrays" in a way that doesn't have nuances and edge cases. _{(I'll make my own suggestions in independent comments, as I come up with them, so they can be emoji-reacted to individually)}

[hax]

I raised the similar issue in original proposal: tc39/proposal-record-tuple#327

Here are the names I suggested: parsePrimitive or parseAsPrimitive

[ljharb]

“Primitive” includes things that JSON doesn’t - symbols and undefined, in particular.

[hax]

@ljharb Yeah, and JSON also don't include bigints and special float values (NaN, ±Infinity). But I think it's still correct to say it only generate primitives?

[OmarCastro]

Well, there is another option, JSON.parseConst. Since the value cannot be changed, it is effectively constant.

[ljharb]

const in JS only has the connotation of "constant reference", which isn't the same as "immutable".

[chimericdream]

What about something like JSON.parseStatic or JSON.parseFinal?

[ljharb]

what's dynamic or non-final about the existing parsing?

[jayaddison]

I'm not a JavaScript/ECMAScript expert by any means, but I would counter-argue that in fact, immutable is an effective term, and one that I'd be comfortable using to describe the parse results of the function in this proposal.

The word "immutable" is commonly used as I understand it as a shorthand way to indicate that something "cannot be modified; remains the same". To mutate something is to change the structure or value of it somehow; if the object is immutable, it cannot be mutated.

As an exception, I'll note from my recent exploration of Object.freeze that Map and Set objects are difficult to make immutable in JavaScript. However, fortunately here we are in a more narrowly-scoped subset, JSON, within which Map and Set cannot be emitted by parsing JSON (as far as I'm aware); and I understand that instances of Record and Tuple -- that would be emitted here -- are inherently unmodifiable.

[jayaddison]

In hindsight I feel that my previous comment might seem condescending since I attempt to re-explain a term that everyone here probably already understands. That wasn't my intent; I wanted to improve the chance that I'd be understood by adding some elaboration -- but sometimes conciseness is more effective. In any case: I think I'll step away from this (and that means I'll unsubscribe too, so there's no need to spend effort catering to / responding to my feedback).