Handling the unexpected - Type safe functions in Javascript

Matthias Reuter — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 10:11:59 +0000

Javascript is a weird language. Great but weird. Take functions for example. You cannot only pass any type of arguments, you can also pass any number of arguments. This may be quite disturbing, especially for Java developers. Recently I had a discussion with a Java developer who complained about missing code assistance in Javascript, by which he meant no hint about the type of an argument.

This is of course due to the dynamically typed nature of Javascript. While in Java you denote the expected type of a parameter, and it's the caller's duty to pass the correct type (even more, you cannot pass a different type), in Javascript it's the function's duty to handle the given parameters and do something reasonable with unexpected types. The question arises: How do you write type safe functions in Javascript? Let me explain this by an example implementation to calculate the greatest common divisor of two numbers.Read more

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Handling the unexpected - Type safe functions in Javascript