Thursday, February 22, 2007

Functions and variables conllision of names

Name Functions Well When naming functions and variables, you need to be a little careful. Because functions and variables share the same namespace, you shouldn’t be declaring variables and functions with the same name. It might be a good idea to precede function names with “func” or some other string or letter of your own choosing. So, using such a scheme, if we had a variable named hello and wanted to define a function also called hello, we would use funcHello.
Note
Some developers prefer different casing to distinguish between variables and functions, but this may not be obvious enough. The choice is a matter of style and we leave it open for readers to decide for themselves.
Besides the obvious collision of names, very subtle bugs may slip in when we have similar names, particularly when you consider that functions are created when the document is parsed, while variables are created when the script is run. Notice in the following script how there is a variable as well as a function called x.
var x = 5;
function x()
{
alert("I'm a function!");
}
alert(typeof x);
You might expect the alert to show x to be a function or, more appropriately, an object because it appears to be defined second. However, as you can see here, it is a number:

The output makes sense if you consider when the function and variables are actually created. The function is created as the script is parsed, while the variable gets created as the script runs. While this was a contrived example, it illustrates the importance of understanding how things are created in JavaScript.

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