The sad truth is that this stuff was not in the first version of JS. It was added AT THE REQUEST OF DEVS (a decision Eich has said he regrets). Like most bad t

The sad truth is that this stuff was not in the first version of JS. It was added AT THE REQUEST OF DEVS (a decision Eich has said he regrets). Like most bad things, it's only around because a big company said so. Like all bad things in JS, there was a push to remove it at ECMA, but Microsoft had reverse-engineered JS into JScript and refused to go along with the changes to fix the weirdness.