function.toString()

Take a general user-defined function F.

In IE4 & 6 (& IIRC 7), F.toString() gives the function as written, with
the original comment and whitespace.

In FireFox 2 and Opera 9, F.toString() apparently regenerates the
function from a quasi-tokenised form, both losing comment and inserting
new whitespace; the whitespacing is similar but not the same.

Are there any other systems in which the behaviour of F.toString() is
significantly different from both the IE type and the FF/O type? If so,
which, and what do they do?

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On Dec 10, 5:42 pm, Dr J R Stockton <j...@merlyn.demon.co.ukwrote:Yes. I ran into this with some debugging code that inspects functions
and it is quite annoying.
I haven't ran into any. Like most things, this seems to be IE vs.
everything else. In this rare case, I prefer IE's implementation.

In comp.lang.javascript message <41fc8017-a659-4d15-86f4-4117973b2f33@d2
1g2000prf.googlegroups.com>, Tue, 11 Dec 2007 02:54:24, David Mark
<dmark.cinsoft@gmail.composted:
So do I, as you will no doubt have realised if you have looked at my
site. OTOH, ISTM that it would be good if function.toString() took
an optional Boolean argument LayItOutAgain with parameter absent
maybe meaning "as previous call".

I'll keep using !/\*/.test(function(){/**/}) .

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Dr J R Stockton wrote:And (in the aspects stated) both fully comply with the specification,
which explicitly states that white space in the representation of the
function is implementation dependant.
In all Opera versions before 7, if a string included a regular
expression literal that literal would be represented in the function's -
toString - output as "[object]". That was (arguably, but probably) a
bug, but it does illustrate the problems with assuming too much from of
the - toString - method of functions, and one of the dangers in trying
to take a function's - toString - output and - eval - it back into a
function object.

Richard.

In comp.lang.javascript message <fjp9hl$sku$1$830fa7a5@news.demon.co.uk>
, Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:33:31, Richard Cornford
<Richard@litotes.demon.co.ukposted:.... -dependent, to be exact. It says more than that explicitly; but it
leaves the combining of string literals implicitly allowed. I was aware
of 16262 15.3.4.2.
I can live with that. There can't be many users of Opera<7 left.
I've no (present) intention of doing that. Thanks.

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