JavaScript scope and closure

Question

I\'m trying to wrap my head around closures (there\'s a joke in there somewhere) and I ran across this:

(function () { /* do cool stuff */ })();

Answer 1

That creates a function, calls it, and discards it.

It might be clearer if you look at it like this:

var throwaway = function(){
    // do cool stuff
};
throwaway();

This is done to create a private namespace. Code in the function can have functions and variables without worrying about conflicting with other code loaded in the page.