A Little More on Nothing

RE: A Little More on Nothing

Ed Ball — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 23:17:00 GMT

Just wanted to say that your blog is far and away the most useful and probably the most interesting blog that I read. Our client application uses IE+DHTML+JScript extensively; we've had to learn a lot of this stuff the hard way. We've learned over time that JScript is an amazingly powerful language, and it is usually a joy to work with, though a compiler/lint/something to help catch spelling errors before runtime would be handy. :-)

RE: A Little More on Nothing

Eric Lippert — Thu, 02 Oct 2003 00:31:00 GMT

Thanks, that's a nice thing to say. If you have any questions or ideas about things you'd like to see in future posts, feel free to send them my way. As for detecting undeclared variables at compile time -- unfortunately in JScript Classic and VBScript that's pretty much impossible due to the way the browser works. Coincidentally, I was planning on posting why exactly that is later this week, so watch this space. Eric

RE: A Little More on Nothing

Peter Torr — Thu, 02 Oct 2003 02:38:00 GMT

You can always try passing your code through JSC (the JScript .NET compiler) as some sort of "lint" program. You may have to artificially declare all the IE globals you use (like 'window') or you can use /fast-

RE: A Little More on Nothing

Lance England — Thu, 02 Oct 2003 07:02:00 GMT

Eric, I also wanted to tell you how incredibly educational your blog is. It has shot to the top of my "must read" list. Your writing style is great. You really do a nice job explaing technical subject matter in a way that is easy to understand. Keep up the great work!

RE: A Little More on Nothing

Eric Lippert — Thu, 02 Oct 2003 21:01:00 GMT

Thanks Lance. One does one's best. Like I said, if you have any ideas or questions for future posts, feel free to send them my way. (Note though that I have 24 items on my ever-growing list of potential future topics, so I might not get to new ones right away...)

re: A Little More on Nothing

quasiperfect — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 16:30:02 GMT

I'm encouraged that JScript.Net improves Jscript where it's weak. But does it break it where it's strong? Is there any way to shoehorn JScript.net into the windows script component framework? I am most concerned about the absence of "option explicit" (vbscript) and the abscence of "use strict(true)" (javascript 2.0) in the implementations of plain JScript that I've tested. Thanks the great commentary. Regards, JPK

re: A Little More on Nothing

Jay Zhang — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 18:16:38 GMT

Another problem with JScript.Net is that it seems that MS .Net support for script engine (VSA) has limited the typeof usage in JScript.Net.
For instance, in JavaScript you can pass undefined argument to typeof without problem:

print(typeof(x));

But if same code is run in VSA implemented script engine, you'll get a compilier error. You have to do something
var x;
if (typeof(x) != "undefined")
print(typeof(x));

In this case what is the point to even have that return value "undefined" if a argument has to be defined or declared first.

Any comment can send to Jay.Zhang@datamaxx.com