ECMAScript

References

• ECMAScript Wikipedia Article

Related

• ActionScipt
• • ActionScript is an object-oriented programming language originally developed by Macromedia Inc. ActionScipt is used primarily for the development of websites and software targeting the Adobe Flash platform, originally finding use on web pages in the form of embedded SWF files.
• JScript
• • JScript is Microsoft's legacy dialect of the ECMAScript standard that is used in Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser and HTML Applications, and as standalone Windows scripting language. JScript has been criticized for being insecure and having multiple security bugs exploited by nation-state actors, leading Microsoft to add an option to disable it.
• Ecma International
• • Ecma International is a nonprofits standards organization for information and communication systems. It acquired its current name in 1994, when the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) changed its name to reflect the organization's global reach and activities. As a consequence, the name is no longer considered an acronym and no longer uses full capitalization.
• automatic semicolon insertion
• • Many languages use the semicolon as a statement terminator,. Most often this is mandatory, but in some languages the semicolon is optional in many contexts. This is mainly done at the level level, where the lexer outputs a semicolon into the token stream, despite one not being present in the input character stream, and is termed semicolon insertion or automatic semicolon insertion. In these cases, semicolons are part of the formal phase grammar of the language, but may not be found in input text, as they can be inserted by the lexer.
• control flow
• • In computer science, control flow (Or flow of control) is the order in which individual statements, instructions, or function calls of an imperative program are executed or evaluated. The emphasis on explicit control flow distinguishes an imperative programming language from a declarative programming language.
• weakly typed
• • In computer programming, one of the many ways that programming languages are colloquially classified is whether the language's type system makes it strongly typed or weakly typed (loosely typed). However, their is no precise technical definition of what the terms mean and different authors disagree about the implied meaning of the terms and the relative rankings of the strength of the type systems of mainstream programming languages.
• duck typing
• • In computer programming, duck typing is an application of the duck test - if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck - to determine whether an object can be used for a particular purpose. With nominative typing, an object is of a given type if it is declared as such (of if a type's association with the object is inferred through mechanisms such as object inheritance). With duck typing, an object is of a given type if it has all methods and properties required by that type.

Notes

ECMAScript (ES) is a standard for scripting languages, including JavaScript, JScript, and ActionScript. It is best known as a JavaScript standard intended to ensure the interoperability of web pages across different web browsers. It is standardized by Ecma International in the document ECMA-262. ECMAScript is commonly used for client-side scripting on the World Wide Web, and it is increasingly being used for server-side applications and services using runtime environments such as Node.js, deno, and bun.

ECMA-262, or the ECMAScript Language Specification, defines the ECMAScript Language, or just ECMAScript. ECMA-262 speicifes only language syntax and the semantics of the core application programming interface, such as Array, Function, and globalThis.

The ECMAScript specification is a standardized specification of a scripting language developed by Brendan Eich of Netscape; initially named Mocha, then LiveScript, and finally JavaScript. In December 1995, Sun Microsystems and Netscape announced JavaScript in a press release. In November 1996, netscape announced a meeting of the Ecma International standards organization to advance the standardization of JavaScript. Since the release of version 6 in June 1015, new major versions of ECMAScript have been finalized and published every June.

• ECMAScript JavaScript supports C-style structured programming
• var, let, and const allow for block scoping and function scoping..
• JavaScript supports automatic semicolon insertion, meaning that semicolons that normally terminate a statement in C may be omitted in JavaScript
• Like C-style languages, control flow is done with the while, for, do/while, if/else, and switch statements. Functions are weakly typed and may accept and return any type.
• ECMAScript is weakly typed. This means that certain types are assigned based on the operation being performed.
• ECMAScript is dynamically typed. Thus, a type is associated with a value rather than an expression. ECMAScfipt supports various ways to test the type of objects, including duck typing.
• Since ES 2015, transpiling JavaScript has become very common. Transpilation is a source-to-source compilation in which newer versions of JavaScript are used, and a transpiler rewrites the source code so that it is supported by older browsers. Transpiling adds an extra step to the build process and is sometimes done to avoid needing polyfills. Polyfills create new features for older environments that lack them.