Re: What do people use Venkman for?

Martin Honnen wrote:
> 
> 
> Robert North wrote:
> 
> 
>> I think the debugger is working, but it does a first pass over the 
>> code, creating global variables, and setting them to null.
>> Then, it goes back and runs the code *properly*.
> 
> 
> Well check the ECMAScript specification, it is *proper* execution to 
> first processs variable declarations to create variables. You can find 
> details about that in the section "12.2 Variable statement" of the 
> ECMAScript edition 3 specification where it says
>   "Variables are created when the execution scope is entered. A Block 
> does not define a new execution
> scope. Only Program and FunctionDeclaration produce a new scope. 
> Variables are initialised to undefined
> when created. A variable with an Initialiser is assigned the value of 
> its AssignmentExpression when the
> VariableStatement is executed, not when the variable is created."
> 
> So what you see in Venkman is simply the script engine creating the 
> variables first and initializing them to undefined, there is nothing 
> wrong with that.
> 
> This is different from languages like Java where variables have block 
> scope. In JavaScript/ECMAScript you can even access a variable before 
> its declaration e.g.
> 
> if (x == 3) {
>   print(x);
> }
> var x;
> 
> as the execution of that program first looks for variable declarations 
> and creates variables. You could say that in ECMAScript variable 
> declarations are "hoisted" to the beginning of the execution scope.
> 

Thank you Martin.
I think that's about a concise and definitive answer as anyone could expect.

I think that lays this issue to rest once and for all.

Cheers
	-Rob.