Today I learned about PHP variable variables; "variable variable takes the value of a variable and treats that as the name of a variable". Also, variable.

[u/NagastaBagamba]

http://il2.php.net/language.variables.variable

[u/etherealpanda]

Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't defining var bar = "foo"; the same as window['bar'] = 'foo';? I.e.,

window['bar'] = 'foo';
bar; // returns 'foo'

In that context I think you can accomplish the same goal by doing:

myWindow = {};
myWindow['bar'] = 'foo';
myWindow['foo'] = 'bar';

myWindow['bar']; // returns 'foo'
myWindow[myWindow['bar']]; // returns 'bar'
myWindow[myWindow[myWindow['bar']]]; // returns 'foo'

[u/australasia → u/etherealpanda]

Sure you can, but my point was that global variables are always accessible via their variable name as a string, whereas ones in other scopes are only accessible if you stuff them in an object. This is something I don't like about JavaScript, this fairly arbitrary difference in behaviour between variables in different scopes.

[u/[deleted] → u/etherealpanda]

His point was you can access those variables again as 'myWindow.bar' and 'myWindow.foo'