Sparse/dense property storage will want this API split to make indexed accesses more efficient. I queried the newsgroup about making the change (versus adding yet another kind of property-access API), and no one expressed concern. It's also worth noting that every use of these methods that I found in mozilla-central was using only the non-negative half of the index space. I expect this is the common case. I wonder, even, how much anyone ever used negative elements -- I'd guess element stuff is mostly used for arrays and arraylike things, and you're not going to hit negative elements there. (I did end up changing some Mozilla callers to avoid possible compiler warnings. Technically I probably could have gotten away without doing this, but it seemed a good time to clean up signage usage in that code when I already had to audit them to make sure none depended on being able to pass negative indexes.)

I'm doing one patch per method changed, to keep things bite-sized. There's no particular reason it couldn't all be concatenated together into one patch, it just might get (a little bit) big.

http://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/f2ff60137bb3 http://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/bcc124e86068 http://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/43dbc22aa5fa http://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/cacc7fdcba7b http://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/77ea7ae6ce08 http://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/30dd110a4ed6 (not part of this bug, but required for the last two patches to be definitely comprehensive) http://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/2d818a0b3cd1 http://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/6030c9f7b3ca

http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/f2ff60137bb3 http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/bcc124e86068 http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/43dbc22aa5fa http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/cacc7fdcba7b http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/77ea7ae6ce08 http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/30dd110a4ed6 http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/2d818a0b3cd1 http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/6030c9f7b3ca