Creating a function with a custom name is not something you can do easily out of the box in ECMAScript. Thankfully, ECMAScript comes with a custom function constructor.
First, the basic code, which will give most of you want you want:
The above will create an anonymous function, which when called creates the named function (using the name variable). This functionality is a good substitute for when you can’t use eval() but you need a function with a custom name. Eval is generally useless in ES5 strict mode for a number of good reasons, so its best avoided.
However, an issue with the code above is that we had to write the main code into a string. This sucks because it makes it difficult to debug (i.e., we can’t easily set break points), so we want to avoid that as much as possible. The solution is to make the main function external, pass it as an argument to the Function constructor to call it.
Another advantage here is that we can set private variables inside our custom function, which can then be mixed with public arguments. Check this out!:
You can basically the start doing cool things from there, like:
The above is mega useful for dynamically implementing custom DOM-like interfaces… like shims. Enjoy! 🙂