Why is a URL in the middle of a function not causing an error?

Question

By mistake, an URL was pasted into a JavaScript snippet. Reduced to a minimum, it looked roughly like this:

function(){
  /* a bunch of code */
  http://www.stackoverflow.com
  /* a bunch of code */
  return "it still works";
}

It was overlooked for quite some time, because it did not produce an error. Why is that? Why does this function still run without erroring?

Answer 1

You're defining a label called http. The // in the url comments the rest out.

see: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Statements/label