Is An Object Just A Function?

[gobbly2100]

Hello, I really am having difficulty understanding objects and what they are, are they pretty much a function?

[Synook]

No. An object basically is a variable that in itself hold other variables (properties) and functions that can be executed within the scope of that object (methods). For example, the document object has properties - such as document.location, giving the current URL of the page, and methods - such as document.write(), which writes text to the page.

[boen_robot]

I recently watched a video about JavaScript, and in it, they say that a method is essentially a property that has a function as a value. It's like

var myObject = {	myMethod: function() {		//function code	}}

is the same as

var myObject = {	function myMethod() {		//function code	}}

Now, I'm not much of a JavaScripter, so please forgive me for any syntax errors this may have.

[packrat]

In java script: a function can return an object and a function is a special type of object. It might help to think of 'Object' as a generic term referring to anything in scripting terminology: a DOM/HTML element is an object, in a script block any literal string ('ABC') or number (123) is an object. Objects may be as simple as a string literal ('ABC') or as complex as you can imagine. I would highly recommend becomming familiar with the fundamentals of object oriented programming, it will make you a more effecient coder and save you a lot of frustration. Please forigve the offsite link, but Wikipedia has a fairly succinct explanation of OOP fundamentals.Wikipedia Object Oriented ProgrammingJavascript/ECMAScript is a prototype based oop implementation; The same concepts apply but the implementation is quite different.Wikipedia Prototype Based Programming

[Synook]

a function is a special type of object

Err...? Functions are not objects, but objects can contain functions as methods.By the way different languages function differently, in JavaScript a string literal is indeed an object but in other languages, such as PHP, it is not.

[justsomeguy]

In Javascript a function and an object are very similar. Consider this:

function testfunc(){  this.a = 1;  this.b = 2;  this.c = 3;    this.calc = function() {	return this.a + this.b * this.c;  }  return this;}var testobj = testfunc();alert(testobj.calc());var testobj2 = new Object;testobj2.a = 1;testobj2.b = 2;testobj2.c = 3;testobj2.calc = function () { return this.a + this.b * this.c };alert(testobj2.calc());

[Synook]

Well true I suppose... but that is just JavaScript trying to add OO functionality after creating an OB language...