What Are "Anonymous Functions" In JScript?

  • Article

"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />One
of our excellent customer support staff in the

United Kingdom
/>
asked me this morning what "anonymous functions" are in JScript.

It's
a little complicated. Two things come to mind: realio-trulio anonymous functions,
and what we used to call "scriptlets".

First
up are actual anonymous functions -- functions which do not have names are, unsurprisingly
enough, called "anonymous functions".

"What
the heck do you mean, functions without names?" I hear you ask. "Surely
all functions have names!" -- well, no, actually, some don't. This
is perfectly legal in JScript:

print
( function(x){return x * 2;} (3)
);

That
prints out "6". What's the name of that
function? It has no name. Of
course, we could give it one if we chose. This
is exactly the same as declaring a named function:

function
double(x){return x * 2;}

print
( double(3) );

But
functions don't need names any more than strings or numbers do. Functions
are just functions whether they’re named or not.

Remember,
JScript is a functional language. Functions
are objects and can be treated like any other object. You
don't have to give an object a name to use it, or you can give them multiple names. Functions
are no different. For example, you can
assign them to variables.

var
myfunc = function(x){return x * 2;}

var
myfunc2 = myfunc;

print
( myfunc(3) );

Those
of you who are familiar with more traditional functional languages, such as Lisp or
Scheme, will recognize that functions in JScript are fundamentally the Lambda Calculus
in fancy dress. (The august Waldemar
Horwat -- who was at one time the lead Javascript developer at AOL-Time-Warner-Netscape
-- once told me that he considered Javascript to be just another syntax for Common
Lisp. I'm pretty sure he was being serious;
Waldemar's a hard core language guy and a heck of a square dancer to boot.)

Anyway,
I'll discuss other functional language properties of JScript in a future post.

One
can also construct anonymous functions at runtime with the Function constructor, though
why you’d want to is beyond me.

print
( new Function("x", "return
x * 2;")(3) );

I
recommend against constructing new functions at runtime based on strings, but that's
a subject for a future post.

Interestingly
enough, what this does internally is constructs the following script text, and compiles
it:

function
anonymous(x){return x * 2;}

So
in fact, this actually does not compile up
an anonymous function -- it compiles up a non-anonymous function named "anonymous".

The
mind fairly boggles.

Second,
there are the anonymous functions constructed when IE builds an event handler.

ASIDE
: In the source code for the script engine these things are called "scriptlets", which
is a terrible, undescriptive, confusing name. At
one point there were three technologies all competing for the name "scriptlet". The
technology presently known as Windows Script Components was originally called "Scriptlets",
which explains the name of the Wrox book "Instant Scriptlets" -- they published based
on a beta released before the name was finalized. We
considered calling Windows Script Components "Scriptoids" and "Script Thingies", but
fortunately cooler heads prevailed.

But
I digress. When you have a button in IE

<BLAH
BLAH BLAH NAME="BUTTON1" ONCLICK="window.alert('Oooh,
you clicked me!');" >

then
the script engine creates a separate compilation scope for the form and compiles up
this string:

function
anonymous(){window.alert('Oooh,
you clicked me!');}

It
then passes the function object back as a dispatch pointer and IE assigns it to the
button's onclick property. Again, this
is a non-anonymous function named "anonymous".

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 16, 2003
    // Closures are your friendfunction MakeAdder(a) {return function(b) {return a + b;}}var Add7 = MakeAdder(7);var Add13 = MakeAdder(13);WScript.Echo(Add13(Add7(22)));

  • Anonymous
    September 16, 2003
    Indeed, that is a subject for another posting.Note that often closures are NOT YOUR FRIEND. There are serious memory-leaking scenarios associated with improper use of closures.

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2003
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2003
    You're thinking of the right thing -- Haskell is a functional language.By "functional" I mean "functions are first class objects". Now, one can certainly argue that so-called "pure" functions are, well, pure. You know, the way, the truth, the light, all that good stuff. The notion that there is a right way and a wrong way to design functions is certainly endemic to users of more traditional functional languages like Scheme, ML, Haskell, etc.

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2003
    Here's another way to think about it -- "functional programming" is writing programs in functional style: no side effects, etc, etc, etc. A "functional programming language" is a language in which one can do functional programming. JScript provides you the tools necessary to do functional programming, so it is a functional language. Now, most people treat JScript as a procedural language or an object oriented language, but that doesn't mean that it isn't also a functional language!

  • Anonymous
    February 16, 2004
    I didn't think your examples really made clear the utility of anonymous functions. One common usage that seems more illustrative is this:

    [given an array A of objects, each with property x]
    A.sort(function(a,b){return a.x<b.x?-1:1})

  • Anonymous
    June 10, 2005
    2003/09/12 What's Up With Hungarian Notation? 2003/09/12 Eric's Complete Guide To BSTR Semantics 2003/09/12...

  • Anonymous
    August 08, 2007
    This is kind of unrelated...but I'm wondering about anonymous functions in C#. In the code below, isn't the primative value type "int x" stack allocated by the runtime thereby allowing you to change the value of a non-existent stack variable by executing the code below? class Program { delegate int TestDelgate(); private static TestDelgate d; static void Main(string[] args) { SetupDelegate(); Console.WriteLine(d().ToString()); Console.WriteLine(d().ToString()); Console.WriteLine(d().ToString()); Console.ReadKey(); } static void SetupDelegate() { int x = 5; d = delegate() { ++x; return x; }; } }

  • Anonymous
    August 08, 2007
    The local is hoisted so that it becomes a member of the class.  That is, your code is equivalent to class program { // ... private class Locals { public int x; public int M() { ++x ; return x; } } static void SetupDelegate() { Locals locals = new Locals(); locals.x = 5; d = locals.M; } See my recent posts about C#/VB closures for more details.