bob only contains an id of the interval used to clear it. When you call clearInterval, it gets the interval associated with that id and clears it. The id isn't changed at all.
see here for demonstration
example:
<html>
<head>
<title>Javascript clearInterval</title>
</head>
<body onload="startInterval();">
<center>
<div id="myTime"></div>
<input type="button" value="start Interval" onclick="startInterval();" />
<input type="button" value="stop Interval" onclick="stopInterval();" />
</center>
<script language="javascript">
var interval;
function startInterval()
{
// setInterval of 1000 milliseconds i.e. 1 second
// to recall the startTime() method again n again
interval = setInterval("startTime();", 1000);
}
function startTime()
{
// Date object to get current time
var timeFormat = new Date();
// set the current time into the HTML div object.
document.getElementById('myTime').innerHTML = timeFormat.toLocaleTimeString();
}
function stopInterval() //***********IMPORTANT FUNC******************
{
// clearInterval to stop the setInterval event
alert(interval);
clearInterval(1);
}
</script>
</body>
</html>
This will show you the interval's id (returned by setInterval earlier). If you know the interval's id is 1, you can just use clearInterval(1) to clear the interval. So your way of using setting bob to null is a good way of doing it. Just be sure that !bob doesn't return true if the bob happens to be 0. :D