Tuesday 5 February 2013

Syntax differences between JavaScript & PL/SQL

I'm sure anyone who's worked with multiple programming languages - particularly at the same time - can attest to the occasional slip-up.

It's just unfortunate that they are just so hard to debug. Take these two statements
console.log('id:' || this.attr('id'));
console.log('id:' +  this.attr('id'));
Both are valid JavaScript statements & both work - in that the execute without error, but one returns the ID attribute value as debug output.

Thanks to Tom in the forums for helping me see what I missed
https://forums.oracle.com/forums/message.jspa?messageID=10654246#10654246
For those with a strong, habitual PL/SQL background such as myself, I think making this mistake at one point was pretty much inevitable.

Basically the first one accepts to expressions within an OR statement, while the second concatenates the two strings as desired.

It makes me wonder how many times strange things like this happen with human language. I'm sure there are some good analogies out there.

I certainly don't envy those people constructing multi-lingual applications - not that much demand here down under :-)

Scott

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