Posts

Adding a Syntax Highlighter

Image
Syntax or code highlighting is important particularly when you need to show code examples on your blog. It is always a big task to read codes on a blog or a website without syntax highlighting, though they are enclosed with code tags. By integrating the syntax highlighter on a blog or a website, readers can read the code examples easier. There are so many free syntax highlighting scripts available on many websites. Most of the scripts are written in JavaScript, though some of them are powered by other programming languages such as Phyton or Ruby. I believe " SyntaxHighlighter by Alex Gorbatchev " is the most common syntax highlighting script used by most of us. It supports a lot of different languages and you can easily create new "brush" for your language if it is not supported by default.

JavaScript Syntax

As of 2008, the latest version of the language is JavaScript 1.8. It is a superset of ECMAScript (ECMA-262) Edition 3. Extensions to the language, including partial E4X (ECMA-357) support and experimental features considered for inclusion into ECMAScript Edition 4.

JavaScript Features

Structured programming JavaScript supports all the structured programming syntax in C (e.g., if statements, while loops, switch statements, etc.). One partial exception is scoping: C-style block-level scoping is not supported. JavaScript 1.7, however, supports block-level scoping with the let keyword. Like C, JavaScript makes a distinction between expressions and statements.

History and Naming JavaScript

JavaScript was originally developed by Brendan Eich of Netscape under the name Mocha, which was later renamed to LiveScript, and finally to JavaScript. The change of name from LiveScript to JavaScript roughly coincided with Netscape adding support for Java technology in its Netscape Navigator web browser. JavaScript was first introduced and deployed in the Netscape browser version 2.0B3 in December 1995. The naming has caused confusion, giving the impression that the language is a spin-off of Java, and it has been characterized by many as a marketing ploy by Netscape to give JavaScript the cachet of what was then the hot new web-programming language.

Brendan Eich

Image
Brendan Eich (born 1961) is a computer programmer and creator of the JavaScript programming language. He is the Chief Technology Officer at the Mozilla Corporation. Education Brendan Eich received his bachelor's degree in math and computer science at Santa Clara University. He received his master's degree in 1986 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

What is JavaScript?

JavaScript is a scripting language most often used for client-side web development. It was the originating dialect of the ECMAScript standard. It is a dynamic, weakly typed, prototype-based language with first-class functions. JavaScript was influenced by many languages and was designed to look like Java, but be easier for non-programmers to work with. Although best known for its use in websites (as client-side JavaScript), JavaScript is also used to enable scripting access to objects embedded in other applications (see below).