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Comment by mediumdeviation | Hacker News Reader

Except ECMAScript isn't correct either. ECMAScript is the name of the standard. Each browser implements a (different) subset of it. JavaScript used to be what Mozilla's implementation was called; Microsoft implemented JScript. ActionScript, the scripting language used in Adoble Flash, is also an implementation of ECMAScript.

Modern browsers implement ECMAScript 5; older browsers and AS 2.0 implement ECMAScript 3. ECMAScript 4 was scrapped, but AS 3.0 still implements it. Wikipedia, as usual, has all the gory details if anyone is actually interested http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript

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I actually read your comment as a strong case for ECMAScript being the most correct. Certainly more than the name of one particular implementation of the language standard.

Browsers all implement HTML differently, but we're happy to refer to it by the name of the standard.

> ECMAScript is the name of the standard. Each browser implements a (different) subset of it. JavaScript used to be what Mozilla's implementation was called; Microsoft implemented JScript.

mocha and livescript were the names at netscape. naming it javascript was a marketing strategy and a product of the sun-netscape cooperation. the ecmascript standard was born later, after the adoption of javascript/jscript.

>ECMAScript is the name of the standard. Each browser implements a (different) subset of it

Supersets, not subsets. In terms of syntax, there is essentially no difference between ECMAScript, JavaScript, and JScript. They're just different implementations of the same thing. In fact, the only reason JScript has a different name is because Microsoft didn't want to license the Java trademark from Sun.

ActionScript is a different animal; it's a superset of ECMAScript and has a lot of additional syntax features, like data type support.

In any case, to work across different browsers, JS code is usually written in the intersection of the ECMAScript superset languages implemented by those browsers. That intersection is ECMAScript.

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