Question

So I’m running JSLint on the lastest version of jQuery available at bit.ly/jqsource. I’ve made the tests as lax as possible, but I still get errors. One of them is “Use a named parameter” on line 327:

target = arguments[0] || {},

What does it mean? Even this blog post doens’t provide information.

Answer 1

It means that the code is accessing the parameter using the arguments collection instead of a parameter specified in the function signature:

You can reproduce the error message with this code:

function x(a) {
    var b = arguments[0];
}

Using the named parameter gives the same result without the lint error:

function x(a) {
    var b = a;
}