Safari and Non-Anonymous Function Passing

In JavaScript, you can pass functions to other functions as a parameter-the same way you would any other object.

So you can do something like this:

function getName()
{
return (name);
}

function addFunction(MyFunction)
{
...
}

var GetNameFunction = getName;
addFunction(GetNameFunction);

In the above we assign a variable to the function getName and then pass it as a parameter to an function called addFunction. But we don't really need the intermediary step of assigning a variable-we can pass the function inline.

function addFunction(MyFunction)
{
...
}

addFunction(function getName()
{
return (name);
});

Naming the function is sort of irrelevant, since the function is assigned to a variable at the receiving function(in this case, the MyFunction variable in addFunction()).

While this will work as is in Firefox and Internet Explorer, Safari's JavaScript parser will choke with a syntax error. Inline functions passed as parameters in Safari must be anonymous. See the corrected code below:

function addFunction(MyFunction)
{
...
}

addFunction(function()
{
return (name);
});

Just wanted to mention this before moving on to the improvements to the getElementsByClass I wrote about last time.