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You're reading from  Professional JavaScript for Web Developers - Fourth Edition

Product typeBook
Published inNov 2019
Reading LevelBeginner
PublisherWiley
ISBN-139781119366447
Edition4th Edition
Languages
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Author (1)
Matt Frisbie
Matt Frisbie
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Matt Frisbie

Matt Frisbie has worked in web development for over a decade. During that time, he's been a startup co-founder, an engineer at a Big Four tech company, and the first engineer at a Y Combinator startup that would eventually become a billion-dollar company. As a Google software engineer, Matt worked on both the AdSense and Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) platforms; his code contributions run on most of the planet's web browsing devices. Prior to this, Matt was the first engineer at DoorDash, where he helped lay the foundation for a company that has become the leader in online food delivery. Matt has written two books and recorded two video series for O'Reilly and Packt, speaks at frontend meetups and web casts, and is a level 1 sommelier. He majored in Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Matt's Twitter handle is @mattfriz.
Read more about Matt Frisbie

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UNDERSTANDING ARGUMENTS

Function arguments in ECMAScript don't behave in the same way as function arguments in most other languages. An ECMAScript function doesn't care how many arguments are passed in, nor does it care about the data types of those arguments. Just because you define a function to accept two arguments doesn't mean you can pass in only two arguments. You could pass in one or three or none, and the interpreter won't complain.

This indifference happens because arguments in ECMAScript are represented as an array internally. The array is always passed to the function, but the function doesn't care what (if anything) is in the array. If the array arrives with zero items, that's fine; if it arrives with more, that's okay, too. In fact, when a function is defined using the function keyword (meaning a non-arrow function), there actually is an arguments object that can be accessed while inside a function to retrieve the values of each argument...

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Professional JavaScript for Web Developers - Fourth Edition
Published in: Nov 2019Publisher: WileyISBN-13: 9781119366447

Author (1)

author image
Matt Frisbie

Matt Frisbie has worked in web development for over a decade. During that time, he's been a startup co-founder, an engineer at a Big Four tech company, and the first engineer at a Y Combinator startup that would eventually become a billion-dollar company. As a Google software engineer, Matt worked on both the AdSense and Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) platforms; his code contributions run on most of the planet's web browsing devices. Prior to this, Matt was the first engineer at DoorDash, where he helped lay the foundation for a company that has become the leader in online food delivery. Matt has written two books and recorded two video series for O'Reilly and Packt, speaks at frontend meetups and web casts, and is a level 1 sommelier. He majored in Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Matt's Twitter handle is @mattfriz.
Read more about Matt Frisbie