Definition of {} is slightly ambiguous

[jyasskin]

Definition of {} is slightly ambiguous

[bathos]

I think “as if from ES null” covers it unambiguously and that the “or an object” part would be more misleading than helpful even if “corrected.” There’s a lot more than just Object.prototype which could impact conversion behavior. Unlike conversion from ES object, conversion from ES null has no observable steps. As there are no ES-observable steps when creating a default dictionary, it should probably not mention object conversion at all.

[domenic]

The intent of that section, if I recall, was that the {} is a purely syntactic decoration that makes it clearer for readers. (See #602.) The sentence you quote was not meant to be a definition, but instead a statement about what that syntactic decoration "represents". In this context, "represents" means "how you should think about it when reading", not anything normative.

Note that "object with no properties" is mean to indicate an object with no properties, not an object which inherits its properties from Object.prototype.

Some more background can be found by digging through #750 and the linked threads.

That said, it seems like there is some gap in the normative requirements here, which fails to translate the default values {} and [] into actual ECMAScript values, of the type that you could put into the overload resolution algorithm's outputs. (Arguably, it's also not very rigorous to take the Web IDL token false and translate that into the ECMAScript boolean value false, either.) We should probably have an explicit procedure that does that conversion between value spaces.