An Array By Any Other Type

2021 is the twentieth anniversary of Douglas Crockford declaring JavaScript as the world's most misunderstood programming language. JavaScript is a complex language, with many follies; however, an under-represented subject in his article is type checking. Type checking is a known pain-point in JavaScript.

The Blunders of typeof

console.log(typeof null); // -> object

typeof null is a known design error¹ that has existed too long to fix.

console.log(typeof []); // -> object

Is this another design error? No. Though this does break the rule of least astonishment, and suggestions have been made to change it, it isn’t considered a design error.

Why is the type of an array an object?

JavaScript consists of two sets of types: primitive values and objects.

What are Primitive Values?

A primitive value can be defined as anything which is not an object, is immutable, and has no methods². These are: string, number, bigint, boolean, undefined, symbol, and null.

What are Objects?

Paraphrasing from JavaScript.info, an object is a keyed collection of data.

What are Arrays?

Arrays extend objects and are ordered collections of data; the key in our collection is an index. Arrays exist purely for convenience, providing implicit ordering and a flurry of helper methods.

Let's go back to the section title: Why is the type of an array an object?

It's defined to — ES5.1 and previous lists a type table stating that if it's an Object and does not implement the internal property [[Call]] the typeof will resolve to Object.

Pre-ECMAScript 2015

Before the introduction of Array.isArray there were two common methods³ of checking if a variable was indeed an array.

instanceof operator / constructor property:

let arr = [];
console.log(arr instanceof Array); // true
// likewise
arr = []; 
console.log(arr.constructor === Array); // true

There are a few nuances which make the above examples less than ideal.

1. instanceof is easy to trick
2. Globals don't extend beyond frames⁴

It Looks like an Array, and Quacks like an Array (Duck Typing)

// Prototype.js (v. 1.6.0.3):

function isArray(object) {
  return object != null && typeof object === "object" &&
    'splice' in object && 'join' in object; 
}

The above example of duck typing is also easy to trick. Any object with a key of splice and join will return true.

Object.prototype.toString - Duck Typing through internal properties.

Note: The current ECMAScript definition for Object.prototype.toString explicitly uses an isArray check.

A suggested patch in dojotoolkit's caveats provides an alternative for its internal use of instanceof⁵, introducing Object.prototype.toString:

console.log(Object.prototype.toString.call('')); // -> [object String]
console.log(Object.prototype.toString.call(1)); //-> [object Number]
console.log(Object.prototype.toString.call([])); // -> [object Array]

How? Up to ES5.1 every object defined internal semantics including an internal [[class]] property. Object.prototype.toString references the property.

This makes the implementation of isArray a string comparison against the return value.

function isArray(object) {
  return Object.prototype.toString.call(object) === '[object Array]';
}

Typing and the future

Since ES5 Array.isArray has alleviated our woes of typing arrays so much that there are talks of further implementations of the Type.isType style⁶.

Node has a util.types API which avoids the changeability of JavaScript, with the overhead of calling into C++.

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1. ^{^1} Design Errors is a heading mentioned in the article.
2. ^{^2} Primitive values have wrapper objects that provide the functionality we're use to seeing in JavaScript.
3. ^{^3} In the non-computer-science definition, i.e. ways of accomplishing something.
4. ^{^4} I'm sure this is one of the reasons that Crockford considers JavaScript the world's most misunderstood language.
5. ^{^5} It also references the aforementioned instanceof frames problem.
6. ^{^6} The implementation of some built-in constructors have isType methods: e.g. Buffer's Buffer.isBuffer method.

---

Acknowledgements

Photo thanks to Daniel Salgado on Unsplash.

This article was inspired by a comment from Kyle Simpson on LinkedIn (must be logged in to see comment).

Some of this article was adapted from instanceof Considered Harmful by kangax.

A majority of this article references ES5.1 as it's more relevant to JavaScript's pre-isArray implementation.

Edits:

10/18/2021: update article url for instanceof Considered Harmful from previous archive.org link

10/22/2021: various grammatical, punctuation, and spelling fixes. No content changes.