Instructor made a mistake. Naming a function doesn't always assign it to a variable automatically.

Question

The instructor had the following code on the screen:

callTwice(function namedFunction(){
  //some arbitrary example code
});

And he said the following words:

"However, this does create the variable called namedFunction, which is accessible from the global scope, so really what this is doing is it's exactly the same as declaring a variable and passing it in."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that is simply untrue. I tried this code myself in the console to be sure, and it went like this:

> function callTwice(f){f();f();}
undefined
> callTwice(function namedFunction(){});
undefined
> namedFunction()
VM109:2 Uncaught ReferenceError: namedFunction is not defined

I wish I understood the exact rules well enough to say exactly when function namedFunction(){...} does create a variable, but I do know that this is not one of those times.

Answer 1 · 2015-01-27T08:57:15Z

January 27, 2015 8:57am

Very interesting question.

Scope here, I think, was probably the incorrect word to use. The JavaScript interpreter or engine has access to it and knows it's name and can therefore output it's name, which seems obvious and it likely is, but I think that is what was meant in order to get the point across that anonymous functions have no name. If you add console.log(f); to callTwice so it looks like:

function callTwice(f){
  f();
  f();
  console.log(f);
}

You will see that 'namedFunction' is output.

However, this doesn't mean it's available in the global scope in the sense that is typically meant where other code can reference it at anytime. This is an example of a "function expression" and they are not visible outside of it's scope. In this particular case, the scope is the function it was declared in, and I suppose more specifically within the arguments of the function. So it is, in fact, a variable as an item within the arguments array. Since it is in the arguments array, garbage collection is done as soon as the function is finished executing which means there will be no reference to it afterwards. So namedFunction can be utilized, and known, anywhere within callTwice, but ONLY within that function call where it is declared, since it's passed as an argument and created at that point.

I likely didn't answer that as well as intended, yet I hope that I helped make the concept a little clearer to understand.

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Josiah McClellan

Josiah McClellan

Instructor made a mistake. Naming a function doesn't always assign it to a variable automatically.

1 Answer

Sean T. Unwin

Sean T. Unwin