You Don't Know JS: Scope & Closures

Appendix B. Polyfilling Block Scope

In Chapter 3, we explored block scope. We saw that with and the catch clause are both tiny examples of block scope that have existed in JavaScript since at least the introduction of ES3.

But it’s ES6’s introduction of let that finally gives full, unfettered block scoping capability to our code. There are many exciting things, both functionally and code-stylistically, that block scope will enable.

But what if we wanted to use block scope in pre-ES6 environments?

Consider this code:

{
    let a = 2;
    console.log( a ); // 2
}

console.log( a ); // ReferenceError

This will work great in ES6 environments. But can we do so pre-ES6? catch is the answer.

try{throw 2}catch(a){
    console.log( a ); // 2
}

console.log( a ); // ReferenceError

Whoa! That’s some ugly, weird looking code. We see a try/catch that appears to forcibly throw an error, but the “error” it throws is just a value 2, and then the variable declaration that receives it is in the catch(a) clause. Mind: blown.

That’s right, the catch clause has block-scoping to it, which means it can be used as a polyfill for block scope in pre-ES6 environments.

“But”, you say, “no one wants to write ugly code like that!” That’s true. No one writes (some of) the code output by the CoffeeScript compiler, either. That’s not the point.

The point is that tools can transpile ES6 code to work in pre-ES6 environments. You can write code using block scoping, and benefit from such functionality, and let a ...