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How evil is eval? (javascriptweblog.wordpress.com)
5 points by heseltine on April 28, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments



@seven - I think the reason for the article was to demonstrate that eval is sometimes necessary - the proof is that even Douglas Crockford himself uses it in his parse JSON method, as do JQuery and Prototype frameworks - and he shows us the examples. I was pretty impressed


Good point, but I still believe that most uses of eval are completely unnecessary and are a result of not knowing the 'power' of the used language.

To quote Crockford: “eval is Evil: The eval function is the most misused feature of JavaScript. Avoid it”

To avoid something does not mean to never use it at all.

The reason I commented this article was perhaps a bit.. hmm.. lets say I was in a bad mood. I felt the author just took a prominent name, a quote, and then he stated the obvious.

Crockford is talking about misusing. I probably do not know enough about javascript to know for sure, but I would guess that his use of eval is not a 'misuse'.


I would say the second commenter on the blog gets it:

… So basically – if you think you have to use eval there's probably another (more correct) way of doing it. (Rasmus Fløe)


Wonderful article. Made me think, anyway.




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