JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition

Immutable Primitive Values and Mutable Object References

There is a fundamental difference in JavaScript between primitive values (undefined, null, booleans, numbers, and strings) and objects (including arrays and functions). Primitives are immutable: there is no way to change (or “mutate”) a primitive value. This is obvious for numbers and booleans—it doesn’t even make sense to change the value of a number. It is not so obvious for strings, however. Since strings are like arrays of characters, you might expect to be able to alter the character at any specified index. In fact, JavaScript does not allow this, and all string methods that appear to return a modified string are, in fact, returning a new string value. For example:

var s = "hello";   // Start with some lowercase text
s.toUpperCase();   // Returns "HELLO", but doesn't alter s
s                  // => "hello": the original string has not changed

Primitives are also compared by value: two values are the same only if they have the same value. This sounds circular for numbers, booleans, null, and undefined: there is no other way that they could be compared. Again, however, it is not so obvious for strings. If two distinct string values are compared, JavaScript treats them as equal if, and only if, they have the same length and if the character at each index is the same.

Objects are different than primitives. First, they are mutable—their values can change:

var o = { x:1 };     // Start with an object
o.x = 2;             // Mutate it by changing the value of a property ...