I was just reading JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford, and came across this statement:
I always use the K&R style, putting the { at the end of a line instead of the front, because it avoids a horrible design blunder in JavaScript's return statement.
A while back, I was introduced to using closure to help get rid of unnecessary global variables in JavaScript by a friend at work, along with the book Pro JavaScript Design Patterns. Instead of something like this:
var myString = 'hi'; function doStuff() { alert(myString); }
You write something like this:
var myNamespace = function() { var myString = 'hi'; return { doStuff: function() { alert(myString); } } }();
But, because I like BSD style, I did this, with line breaks before the opening braces:
var myNamespace = function() { var myString = 'hi'; return { doStuff: function() { alert(myString); } } }();
When I tried to call doStuff, I promptly got the JavaScript error "myNamespace is null or not an object."
After much head-scratching and debugging, I learned the hard way that ECMAScript defines the return statement like this:
return [no LineTerminator here] Expressionopt ;
Let me put that a slightly different way:
return [!!!NO LINE_TERMINATOR HERE!!!] Expressionopt ;
And that's the story of how I became a convert to using K&R style when coding JavaScript.
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