What does ‘::’ (double colon) do in javascript?

Question

The documentation of some JavaScript API shows the following snippets as example how to invoke some function:

<button type="button" onClick="foo.DoIt(72930)">Click</button>

<button type="button" onClick="foo.DoIt(42342::37438)">Click</button>

:: is obviously used here to allow either one or two arguments to be passed to the function.

What does :: do in JavaScript?

And how does the function know if one or two values were passed? How does it read them?

---

EDIT

On closer look, the examples show other weird stuff like

<button type="button" onClick="foo.Bar(72//893)">Click</button>

<button type="button" onClick="foo.Qux(425;1,34::)">Click</button>

At least the // looks just wrong. So I guess it's not some fancy new syntax that I'm not aware of but maybe the example are just missing quotes around a single string argument.

Answer 1

Nothing. It is a syntax error.

>>> alert(42342::37438)
SyntaxError: missing ) after argument list

Answer 2

In which example did you see that? So far, JavaScript does not have a double colon operator!

The double colon replaced the single-colon selectors for pseudo-elements in CSS3 to make an explicit distinction between pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements. But that is CSS3, not JavaScript! Not At ALL!

Answer 3

Perhaps its a typo and the whole thing is expected to be in quotes.

Answer 4

'::' has nothing to do with the number of parameters. You can do that already in javascript with a normal comma:

function SomeFunction(param1, param2) {
   //...
}

SomeFunction('oneParam'); //perfectly legal

Also, based on Tzury Bar Yochay's answer, are you sure you're not looking at something like this:

$('this::is all one::parameter');  //jQuery selector

Answer 5

I am guessing that the parameter list for foo.DoIt() is generated by code, and one the values was empty.

Answer 6

It must be a typo for

<button type="button" onClick="foo.DoIt('72930')">Click</button>

<button type="button" onClick="foo.DoIt('42342::37438')">Click</button>