Functions as arguements « Life is grand

Functions as arguements

Slash7 has posted the slides from their brilliant Javascript Boot Camp Tutorial talk at OSCON. 108 pages of pure JavaScript love. One thing I just learnt, on page 36, is that you can pass a function as an arguement into another function. That function can then call the arguement function. Sounds weird but that is pretty amazing if you ask me.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 28th, 2006 at 9:18 am and is filed under Code, Development, Function, JavaScript, JavaScript Boot Camp, OSCON, PDF, Presentation, Slides, arguement, slash7, tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Brian Delahunty 2 years ago 1 point
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You can do that is C++ using function pointers and it's the same as Delegates in C#... you can pass a function into a function as a paramater and it can then call it etc.

I think Java has something similar.

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http://briandela.com/blog/

Justin Mason 2 years ago 1 point
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hi Paul --

This is a reasonably common feature in dynamic languages like Perl, Python and Ruby.

some of the things it allows are mindblowing; it gets even better when variable scoping is modified to allow "closures". You know the java pattern whereby you need to define an interface to receive a callback, then callers need to define instances of that interface etc. etc.? That becomes a single line of code in perl ;) it's truly beautiful in terms of simplification and readability.

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http://taint.org/

Shog9 2 years ago 1 point
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What's even better is that you can return functions. Combined with closures, this results (for me) in a huge reduction in the need for big class hierarchies of simple classes, and drastically reduced the sort of cruft and namespace pollution that made me hate C++ so many years ago (a hatred that only diminished when i learned about templates).

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