hey guys, someone from doctype sent me here. long story short: var o="before"; x = function() //this needs to be an anonymous function { alert(o); //the variable "o" is from the parent scope }; o="after"; //this chages "o" in the anonymous function x(); //this results in in alert("after"); //which is not the way i want/need it in reality my code is somewhat more complex. my script iterates through many html objects and adds an event listener each element. i do this by declaring an anonymous function for each element and call another function with an ID as argument. that ID is represented by the "o"-variable in this example. after some thinking i understand why it is the way it is, but is there a way to get js to evaluate o as i declare the anonymous function without dealing with the id attribute and fetching my ID from there? my full source code is here: http://pastebin.com/GMieerdw the anonymous function is on line 303