A Perplexing JavaScript Parsing Puzzle

Have you ever scratched your head over a peculiar JavaScript behavior? Look no further! In this article, we'll delve into a puzzling phenomenon that has left many web developers scratching their heads.

The Mystery: Printing 1 at the Beginning of a Line

When you run the following code in a browser console:

x = 1; x; // 

you'll get an unexpected result: `1` is printed to the console.

But why? What's going on behind the scenes that makes this happen?

To understand this phenomenon, let's take a trip back in time. Netscape Navigator 2 introduced both JavaScript and the `

This hack allowed modern browsers to parse the script as JavaScript while ignoring it for older browsers that didn't recognize `