Question

Possible Duplicate:
Is Chrome's JavaScript console lazy about evaluating arrays?

I have the following snippets in javascript whose output makes me feel that something is going wrong.

1.

a=2;
console.log(a);
a+=2;
console.log(a);

Output:2 4 ; as expected

2.

t=[0,2];
console.log(t);
t[0]+=2;
console.log(t);

Output: [2,2] [2,2]

Shouldn’t the output be [0,2] [2,2] ? And whats the difference between the above two cases that results in the different answers in both the cases?

Answer 1

It’s because the log is delayed until Chrome has time to do it (i.e. your scripts releases the CPU).

Try this to understand what happens :

var t=[0,2];
console.log(t);
setTimeout(function() {
     t[0]+=2;
   console.log(t);
}, 1000);

It outputs what you expect.

Is that a bug of Chrome ? Maybe a side effect of an optimization. At least it’s a dangerous design…

Why is there a difference ? I suppose Chrome stores temporarily what it must log, as a primary (immutable) value in the first case, as a pointer to the array in the last case.