Duplicated Argument Names

By  on  

Oftentimes we override or monkey patch functions and, in many cases, there are arguments we don't care too much about. A common practice for those arguments is using _ for argument names -- it's a generally accepted and known practice for "this isn't important". I started thinking about multiple useless arguments and if you could use the same name for the sake of minification -- you can.

So what happens when you use the same argument name more than once? An error? Uses the first value? The last value? Let's have a look:

function myFunc(_, _, _) {
  console.log("_: ", _);
}

myFunc(1, 2, 3);

// >> 3

The duplicated argument is given the value of the last provided argument. If, however, "use strict" is used, an error will be thrown.

For some reason I expected an error when using an argument name more than once. On the other end, you can change argument values so I shouldn't be surprised. Anyway, happy coding!

Recent Features

  • By
    fetch API

    One of the worst kept secrets about AJAX on the web is that the underlying API for it, XMLHttpRequest, wasn't really made for what we've been using it for.  We've done well to create elegant APIs around XHR but we know we can do better.  Our effort to...

  • By
    Facebook Open Graph META Tags

    It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites.  Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly.  And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website.  One...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools Fun with Fx.Shake

    Adding movement to your website is a great way to attract attention to specific elements that you want users to notice. Of course you could use Flash or an animated GIF to achieve the movement effect but graphics can be difficult to maintain. Enter...

  • By
    Image Data URIs with PHP

    If you troll page markup like me, you've no doubt seen the use of data URI's within image src attributes. Instead of providing a traditional address to the image, the image file data is base64-encoded and stuffed within the src attribute. Doing so saves...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!