ECMAScript (; ES) is a JavaScript standard intended to ensure the interoperability of web pages across different browsers. It is standardized by Ecma International in the documen
ECMA-262
ECMAScript is commonly used for client-side scripting on the World Wide Web, and it is increasingly being used for writing server-side applications and services using Node.js and other runtime environments.

ECMAScript, ECMA-262 and JavaScript

ECMA-262, or the ''ECMAScript Language Specification'', defines the ''ECMAScript Language'', or just ECMAScript. ECMA-262 specifies only language syntax and the semantics of the core API, such as , , and , while valid implementations of JavaScript add their own functionality such as input-output and file-system handling.

History

The ECMAScript specification is a standardized specification of a scripting language developed by Brendan Eich of

Netscape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was onc ...

; initially named Mocha, then LiveScript, and finally JavaScript. In December 1995,

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

and Netscape announced JavaScript in a press release. In November 1996, Netscape announced a meeting of the Ecma International standards organization to advance the standardization of JavaScript. The first edition of ECMA-262 was adopted by the Ecma General Assembly in June 1997. Several editions of the language standard have been published since then. The name "ECMAScript" was a compromise between the organizations involved in standardizing the language, especially Netscape and Microsoft, whose disputes dominated the early standards sessions. Eich commented that "ECMAScript was always an unwanted trade name that sounds like a skin disease." ECMAScript has been formalized through operational semantics by work at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

and the Department of Computing, Imperial College London for security analysis and standardization.

Version history

Features

The ECMAScript language includes structured, dynamic,

functional Functional may refer to: * Movements in architecture: ** Functionalism (architecture) ** Form follows function * Functional group, combination of atoms within molecules * Medical conditions without currently visible organic basis: ** Functional sy ...

, and prototype-based features.

Imperative and structured

ECMAScript JavaScript supports C style structured programming. Previously, JavaScript only supported function scoping using the keyword var, but ECMAScript 2015 added the keywords let and const allowing JavaScript to support both block scoping and function scoping. JavaScript supports automatic semicolon insertion, meaning that semicolons that are normally used to terminate a statement in C may be omitted in JavaScript. Like C-style languages, control flow is done with the , , / , / , and statements. Functions are weakly typed and may accept and return any type. Arguments not provided default to .

Weakly typed

ECMAScript is

weakly typed In computer programming, one of the many ways that programming languages are colloquially classified is whether the language's type system makes it strongly typed or weakly typed (loosely typed). However, there is no precise technical definition o ...

. This means that certain types are assigned implicitly based on the operation being performed. However, there are several quirks in JavaScript's implementation of the conversion of a variable from one type to another. These quirks have been the subject of a talk entitled ''Wat''.

Dynamic

ECMAScript is dynamically typed. Thus, a type is associated with a value rather than an expression. ECMAScript supports various ways to test the type of objects, including duck typing.

Transpiling

Since ES 2015, transpiling JavaScript has become very common. Transpilation is a source-to-source compilation in which newer versions of JavaScript are used, and a transpiler rewrites the source code so that it is supported by older browsers. Usually, transpilers transpile down to ES3 to maintain compatibility with all versions of browsers. The settings to transpiling to a specific version can be configured according to need. Transpiling adds an extra step to the build process and is sometimes done to avoid needing polyfills. Polyfills create new features for older environments that lack them. Polyfills do this at runtime in the interpreter, such as the user's browser or on the server. Instead, transpiling rewrites the ECMA code itself during the build phase of development before it reaches the interpreter.

Conformance

In 2010, Ecma International started developing a standards test for Ecma 262 ECMAScript. Test262 is an ECMAScript conformance test suite that can be used to check how closely a JavaScript implementation follows the ECMAScript Specification. The test suite contains thousands of individual tests, each of which tests some specific requirement(s) of the ECMAScript specification. The development of Test262 is a project of the Ecma Technical Committee 39 (TC39). The testing framework and individual tests are created by member organizations of TC39 and contributed to Ecma for use in Test262. Important contributions were made by Google (Sputnik testsuite) and Microsoft who both contributed thousands of tests. The Test262 testsuite consisted of tests . ECMAScript specifications through ES7 are well-supported in major web browsers. The table below shows the conformance rate for current versions of software with respect to the most recent editions of ECMAScript.

References

{{List of International Electrotechnical Commission standards Computer-related introductions in 1997 C programming language family Computer standards Dynamically typed programming languages Ecma standards JavaScript dialect engines JavaScript programming language family Object-based programming languages Programming languages with an ISO standard Prototype-based programming languages Scripting languages Source-to-source compilers