User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14 Build Identifier: { f(); function f() { document.body.innerHTML = 'PASS'; } } The outer curly braces cause an exception to be thrown (f is not defined) in Firefox. IE, Safari, and Opera run f. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: Go to http://xenon.stanford.edu/~jamesren/tests/reorder-test-a.html Actual Results: FAIL: f is not defined Expected Results: PASS Removing the curly braces allows all browsers to run f: http://xenon.stanford.edu/~jamesren/tests/reorder-test-b.html

I can reproduce this in Firefox 3 RC1 as well.

Invalid as a bug based on ECMA standards, since ECMA-262 Ed. 3 does not specify function definitions as sub-statements -- only as expressions and at top-level. The extension in SpiderMonkey is old and it serves to satisfy the conditional compilation use-case: if (DEBUG) { function maybe() {...} } if DEBUG evaluates to falsy, no function maybe is defined. More, this means the binding of maybe depends on evaluation of the sub-statement containing it. Same goes for the testcase in comment 0. ECMA-262 Ed. 3 (chapter 16) allows syntactic extensions, which the function as sub-statement definitely is an example of. That we differ from other browsers is a tolerable consequence of ES3 chapter 16 allowing syntactic extension. Note that for ES4, function in a block will be block-scoped, but hoiste to top of the block, so the testcase in comment 0 will work. /be

So is this INVALID? OR a dupe of bug 585536, bug 561670, bug 593176?

Forward-duping to where you will actually get what you ask for (function hoisting in blocks, albeit only in strict mode): bug 1071877.

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #8) > Forward-duping to where you will actually get what you ask for (function > hoisting in blocks, albeit only in strict mode): bug 1071877. > > *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1071877 *** Are you sure? Bug 1071646 sounds like a better match to me as bug 1071877 doesn't plan to hoist it out of the block.