It's very common nowadays for Javascript libraries / functions / code snippets to be encapsulated with an anonymous function, e.g.
(function () {
// code to be executed goes here
})();
As far as I can tell, that should be completely superfluous: that anonymous function just executes the code within. However, there's obviously a reason behind this! :-)
I've seen an occurrence of this with a comment alongside the first line: "// function wrapper for Opera".
Does anyone know why this code is commonly used, what the history of its development is, and what the relation with Opera is?
