Uncaught TypeError: (intermediate value)(…) is not a function

Everything works fine when I wrote the js logic in a closure as a single js file, as:

(function(win){
   //main logic here
   win.expose1 = ....
   win.expose2 = ....
})(window)

but when I try to insert a logging alternative function before that closure in the same js file,

 window.Glog = function(msg){
     console.log(msg)
 }
 // this was added before the main closure.

 (function(win){
   //the former closure that contains the main javascript logic;
 })(window)

it complains that there is a TypeError:

Uncaught TypeError: (intermediate value)(...) is not a function

What did I do wrong?

Answer

The error is a result of the missing semicolon on the third line:

window.Glog = function(msg) {
  console.log(msg);
}; // <--- Add this semicolon

(function(win) {
  // ...
})(window);

The ECMAScript specification has specific rules for automatic semicolon insertion, however in this case a semicolon isn’t automatically inserted because the parenthesised expression that begins on the next line can be interpreted as an argument list for a function call.

This means that without that semicolon, the anonymous window.Glog function was being invoked with a function as the msg parameter, followed by (window) which was subsequently attempting to invoke whatever was returned.

This is how the code was being interpreted:

window.Glog = function(msg) {
  console.log(msg);
}(function(win) {
  // ...
})(window);