JavaScript scope and closure

Question

I\'m trying to wrap my head around closures (there\'s a joke in there somewhere) and I ran across this:

(function () { /* do cool stuff */ })();

Answer 1

Putting the function declaration inside parens creates an expression which evaluates to the anonymous function within. Therefore, the first parenthetical evaluates to a function.

The "empty parens" at the end invoke the defined function, so "//do cool stuff" executes immediately.

This is a way to execute code on-the-fly while also keeping variables out of the global scope.

What is illustrated here, however, has nothing to do with closures - at least not directly. Closures are about maintaining a lexical scope after a parent function has already exited.