On Thu, 13 Jan 2011 18:33:53 +0100, Joel Dart <[email protected]> wrote:
Why? Well, simply because that's how the specification says it should
be.
I'm taking a guess here, trying to justify this and would appreciate
feedback in my thinking. Since new has to set up the prototype chain,
it would necessarily have to return an object since primitives do not
have properties and methods. Does this sound right?
That doesn't explain the existence of Number as a constructor.
Built-in functions doesn't have to work as constructors, but Number does,
and it was a deliberate choice.
I'm guessing it was intended to mirror Java's wrapper classes (Integer
as wrapper for int, Long as wrapper for long, etc).
I.e., it's intended to make an object that represents the primitive
value.
That made sense in Java, because you couldn't use objects and primitives
interchangably, but it really doesn't make sense in JavaScript. Creating
Number objects is pretty much useless. If you ever need an *object* that
stores a number value, you can just create a custom object yourself and
store the number value as a property - it's probably also better Object
Oriented modelling than using a generic Number object with no inherent
meaning in your model.
/L
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