Messing around with things and trying to find a good way to make a string reference-able...

ReferencableString.js

var StringReference = function(scope, str) {
    if(str===void 0) { str = scope; scope = window; };

    Object.defineProperty(scope, "__"+str, {
        configurable: true,
        enumerable: false,
        get: function(){
            return scope[str];
        },
        set: function(val){
            return scope[str] = val;
        }
    });
 
    var ret = new Function();

    ret.prototype.valueOf = ret.prototype.toString = function(){
        return this.get();
    };

    ret.prototype.set = function(val) {
        return scope["__"+str] = val;
    };

    ret.prototype.get = function() {
        return scope["__"+str]
    };

    return new ret();
};

The issue I noticed when writing the above example was the fragility involved in passing around the portable property. Because of the fragility, accidentally passing in myString instead of myString.__instance__ would no longer allow the setter to be called within the setString() method.

Because of this, the only other option would be to make it impossible to dereference and just scrap the __instance__ method.

The issue with this is that this sort of functionality could be incredibly cumbersome for JavaScript engines to implement. This type of functionality would probably have a couple implementations at most before dying off, with browsers like Internet Explorer shrieking at the idea that they might have to implement something as difficult as setters/getters in the first place.

The nice thing about the "old fashioned," manually written getter/setter objects was that they were portable regardless of their value.

Using myVar.getValue() and myVar.setValue() would always update the variable in the initial scope back when we declared the myVar object, and we could lug it around wherever we needed to. Unfortunately, we cannot do this with native setters/getters...