historical: find out design choices that led to status quo ordering

[bmeck]

Can't find any links in notes about this, however; ES4 did use the specifier only per archived copy of an overview pdf

[myshov]

I believe the whole work history on this feature was on wiki.ecmascript.org but this site is not available anymore :( Champions of this feature were Dave Herman (@dherman) and Sam Tobin-Hochstadt (@samth).

[samth]

You can find almost all of the old information here: https://www.ecma-international.org/archive/ecmascript/ and in things that links to.

[samth]

As for the particular decision here, import was an existing reserved keyword, making the grammar easier to make work. Additionally, some people preferred the uniformity of having import as the initial keyword in all imports.

The alternative ordering proposed here was definitely discussed.

[bmeck]

@samth the last discussion I could find in the archives which had a form similar to this proposal was https://www.ecma-international.org/archive/ecmascript/2009/TC39/tc39-2009-012.pdf . If the move was purely to make the grammar/consistency better the details might be lost to notes not being available. Do you know if tooling or ease of use was ever discussed?

[samth]

Dave and I developed our proposal separately from that one. This is the original presentation on our design: https://www.ecma-international.org/archive/ecmascript/2010/TC39/tc39-2010-017.pdf, which has a different syntax than what we ended up with. I don't precisely recall the details of how everything changed, but certainly tooling and ease of use were discussed.

[bmeck]

@samth thanks, I saw that but no details on these discussions. This helps.

[svr93]

I see some changes between two dates:
May 9, 2011 - https://web.archive.org/web/20110509070046/http://wiki.ecmascript.org:80/doku.php?id=harmony:modules (examples with @samth form import Bar.y;)

and July 10, 2011 -
https://web.archive.org/web/20110710042340/http://wiki.ecmascript.org:80/doku.php?id=harmony:modules (import y from Bar;)

https://www.ecma-international.org/archive/ecmascript/2011/TC39/tc39-2011-037.pdf - example with import foo.* form

@bmeck no details at all. Maybe this information with dates can help to find related discussions.

[samth]

Somewhere the meeting notes must be archived, but I don't know where that is.