Todd - You're correct, it's used to induce a contained scope.
This was a technique that, if I remember correctly, I learned from Dean Edwards (http://dean.edwards.name/) I use to use: (function(){ ... })(); but new function() { ... }; is much cleaner, IMO. As far as I know, that is the "best" way to have a local scope, at least until JavaScript 2.0 comes out and you can do: let( foo = 'bar' ) { // ... do stuff with 'foo' } // foo doesn't exist out here --John On 9/27/06, Todd Menier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello, > I've been poking around a bit in the jQuery source code. It's been > enlightening and has proven that I don't know as much about Javascript as I > thought I did! > > Here's a pattern that occurs frequently that I'm really curious about: > > new function() { > // do stuff > } > > Is the purpose of this just to provide local scope to the variables used? Is > there an equivalant syntax that may be more common? I intuitively wouldn't > even think the code inside the function would get executed unless the whole > thing was proceeded by "()", but obviously I'd be wrong. What's really > surprising is that I couldn't find any information about this technique in a > google search. > > Just curious. > > Thanks, > Todd > > _______________________________________________ > jQuery mailing list > discuss@jquery.com > http://jquery.com/discuss/ > > > -- John Resig http://ejohn.org/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ jQuery mailing list discuss@jquery.com http://jquery.com/discuss/
