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An OO JS tutorial should also include a discussion of the this pointer, and how it's not like other OO languages. In JS, this reflects the context of the calle

• mdgrech23 14y ago
  My first thought here was holy cow yes it should! My second though was ack, there's a lot to go over. Sounds like a good topic to cover in a second post. However if you see a way to nicely integrate into the current post in brevity I'm all ears and would be happy to update the post :) Thanks!
• tikhonj 14y ago
  The problem is that in JavaScript functions (and, consequently, methods) are first-class citizens. If `this` reflected the value of the object, certain code would work oddly: var a = {fn : function () {this.doStuff()}}, b = {}; b.method = a.fn;// What now? So what JavaScript did actually makes some sense. Another viable solution would be to have `this` passed into a method explicitly, like in Python. Then the expression `a.b()` could desugar to something like `a.b(a)` with `b` expecting `this` as its first argument. This also has some disadvantages. You could also do like Lua and have a separate syntax for calling methods this way (a:b()), but this is also confusing. In short, there is no perfect solution.