Funny, it must be one of my handicaps from learning C++ before C. I think the vogue at the time was to avoid shortcuts like that and avoid shortcuts like if (!x) for pointers. Richard MacCutchan wrote: I don't find Javascript that different, syntactically, from C or Java. Once I got into the details of it, the common syntax made things more complicated for me than if it was more foreign. When I read javascript now every time I see x != null instead of !x or x !== null, I immediately leap to the conclusion that the author is still thinking that everything works like C# and there are probably subtle bugs lurking in the code. Using the full on javascript style is a message to my future self that the code was written when I better understood the way javascript works. Curvature of the Mind now with 3D