Understanding ECMAScript versioning

ECMAScript is the formal standard for the JavaScript language. The first three iterations of the language occurred between 1997 and 1999. A 10-year gap followed before ECMAScript 5 in December 2009. ES5 introduced few new features and focused on cleaning up the language. It introduced strict modes and addressed various inconsistencies, flaws, or gotchas in earlier versions.

2015 saw a major change to the language and to the versioning approach. ECMAScript 2015 (formerly ECMAScript 6) introduced many significant new language features. These include classes, let/const keywords and block-scoping, arrow functions, and native promises. In the rest of this chapter, we'll look at some of the other significant new features ...

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