Book Image

Learn ECMAScript - Second Edition

By : MEHUL MOHAN, Narayan Prusty
Book Image

Learn ECMAScript - Second Edition

By: MEHUL MOHAN, Narayan Prusty

Overview of this book

Learn ECMAScript explores implementation of the latest ECMAScript features to add to your developer toolbox, helping you to progress to an advanced level. Learn to add 1 to a variable andsafely access shared memory data within multiple threads to avoid race conditions. You’ll start the book by building on your existing knowledge of JavaScript, covering performing arithmetic operations, using arrow functions and dealing with closures. Next, you will grasp the most commonly used ECMAScript skills such as reflection, proxies, and classes. Furthermore, you’ll learn modularizing the JS code base, implementing JS on the web and how the modern HTML5 + JS APIs provide power to developers on the web. Finally, you will learn the deeper parts of the language, which include making JavaScript multithreaded with dedicated and shared web workers, memory management, shared memory, and atomics. It doesn’t end here; this book is 100% compatible with ES.Next. By the end of this book, you'll have fully mastered all the features of ECMAScript!
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
PacktPub.com
Contributors
Preface
Index

Default parameter values


In JavaScript, there is no defined way to assign default values to function parameters that are not passed. So programmers usually check for parameters with the undefined value (as it is the default value for missing parameters) and assign the default values to them. The following example demonstrates how to do this:

 function myFunction(x, y, z) {
 x = x === undefined ? 1 : x;
 y = y === undefined ? 2 : y;
 z = z === undefined ? 3 : z;
 console.log(x, y, z); //Output "6 7 3"
 }
 myFunction(6, 7);

This can be done in an easier way by providing a default value to function arguments. Here is the code that demonstrates how to do this:

function myFunction(x = 1, y = 2, z = 3) {
 console.log(x, y, z); 
}
myFunction(6,7); // Outputs 6 7 3

In the preceding code block, since we've passed first two arguments in the function calling statement, the default values (that is x = 1 and y = 2) will be overwritten with our passed values (that is x = 6 and y = 7). The third argument is not passed, hence its default value (that is z =3) is used.

Also, passing undefined is considered as missing an argument. The following example demonstrates this:

function myFunction(x = 1, y = 2, z = 3) {
   console.log(x, y, z); // Outputs "1 7 9"
 }
 myFunction(undefined,7,9);

A similar thing happens here. If you want to omit the first argument, just pass undefined in that.

Defaults can also be expressions. The following example demonstrates this:

 function myFunction(x = 1, y = 2, z = x + y) {
   console.log(x, y, z); // Output "6 7 13"
 }
 myFunction(6,7);

Here, we're making use of the argument variables themselves inside a default argument value! That is, whatever you pass as the first two arguments, if the third argument is not passed it'll take the value of the sum of the first two arguments. Since we passed 6 and 7 to the first and second argument, z becomes 6 + 7 = 13.