Huh. On the scale from pragmatic idiosyncrasy to simply bizarre, making a string literal expression change the runtime behaviour in that manner is fairly wide towards the bizarre end of the scale.
I think, if anything, requiring it to be in a comment would have been less odd; at least comments imply a sense of "meta"-ness.
> On the scale from pragmatic idiosyncrasy to simply bizarre, making a string literal expression change the runtime behaviour in that manner is fairly wide towards the bizarre end of the scale.
Yes, on the other hand it's quite necessary to not have non-compliant browsers blow up. `"use strict";` is just a noop in e.g. IE6. `use strict;` would be an error in it.
> I think, if anything, requiring it to be in a comment would have been less odd; at least comments imply a sense of "meta"-ness.
Javascript compressors definitely strip comments. They probably don't strip strings.
Yeah, I always thought the string idea was wacko too, but introducing a new keyword in a language that has to be backwards compatible or suffer doom isn't a good idea either.
I think, if anything, requiring it to be in a comment would have been less odd; at least comments imply a sense of "meta"-ness.