Question

JSHint is telling me that my methods are not recognized if they are not defined before they are used.

I can try to re-arrange all my methods in order but I’m hoping there is a way to aboid the warnings by “forward declaring” the methods.

I’m not too sure what the correct name is but I want the interpreter to know that these functions exist further on down in the code.

Full report here – http://www.jshint.com/reports/67008

Thanks

Answer 1

I want the interpreter to know that these functions exist further on down in the code.

The interpreter does know that these functions exist further down in the code. The code should run with no problems. It is only jshint that doesn’t like it.

There is nothing wrong with declaring your functions in the order that you find useful and meaningful, for example it is normal (and helpful) to declare related functions near each other. Personally, I find it helpful to declare page initialisation type functions at the top of my script, even though they will inevitably call other functions that are declared later.

If you introduced some kind of “pre-declaration” to your code I would think that’d make your code harder to read and maintain, because obviously then you’ve got to match up the pre-declarations with the real declarations even though they will be spaced far apart in the code. When you come back the next week and change your functions you have to remember to update both parts of the code. Which means you’re more likely to introduce inconsistencies and bugs.

So, given that the point of jshint is to make your code more reliable, surely you don’t want to add some artificial construct just to pass jshint even though that would make the code less reliable in the long run?

The only restructuring you should consider to avoid that warning is re-ordering the functions, but in my opinion you’re better off ignoring the warning in this case. (Is there an option to turn the warning off?)