Unattached anonymous functions and doubly named methods in javascript?

Question

I'm debugging an app that uses .NET's scriptmanager.

It may be a glitch in firebug, but when I read through the code there are a lot of lines like the following:

// anonymous functions not attached as handlers and not called immediately
function () {
    //code
}

// named functions added as methods
myObj = {
    myMethod: function myFunctionName() {
        //code
    }

}

Are these lines valid and, if so, what do they do and what possible reason would there be for coding like this (and I won't accept "It's microsoft - what d'you expect" as an answer)?

What would '//code' be? Do these functions actually contain meaningful code? — Alexander Gessler, Mar 24 '11 at 11:21
they seem to, in most instances. Things like observer._addListener(handler); — wheresrhys, Mar 24 '11 at 12:18

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 09:58

2

This might be worth a read: How does an anonymous function in JavaScript work?

edited May 23 '17 at 09:58

Community

1
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answered Mar 24 '11 at 11:21

firefox1986

1,602
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That offers a bit of justification for double-naming a method (though I don't think the methods in the scriptmanager code were referring to themselves, so it's still a mystery to me why the methods are double-named). As for the unexecuted and unattached anonymous functions... still at a loss as to why they're there – wheresrhys Mar 24 '11 at 12:42

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 18 '11 at 23:41

They are there because some busy programmer was intending to do something and ran out of time, but left the stub as a reminder of work to be done. They do nothing as of yet.

or to watermark the code for checks that are done elsewhere in the logic

or simply put there to obfuscate...

Unattached anonymous functions and doubly named methods in javascript?

2 Answers2