History

This warning has existed in a few forms in both JSLint and JSHint. It was introduced in the original version of JSLint and has remained in both tools ever since.

• In JSHint prior to version 1.0.0 the warning given was "Confusing minusses"

• In JSHint 1.0.0 and above the spelling has been corrected and the message used is now "Confusing minuses"

• JSLint has always used the more generic "Confusing use of '{a}" warning in the same situation

When do I get this error?

The "Confusing minuses" error is thrown when JSHint encounters an addition operator in which the right-hand-side expression is preceded by the unary - operator. In the following example we attempt to compute the addition of a numeric literal and the numeric value of a variable:

var a = "10",
    b = 5 - -a;

Why do I get this error?

This error is raised to highlight a potentially confusing piece of code. Your code will most likely run as expected but it could cause issues with maintenance and be confusing to other developers.

The - operator is overloaded in JavaScript. Most commonly it can be seen as the subtraction operator but it also functions in a unary form as a numeric casting and negating operator. In this unary form the result of the expression will be the value of the operand coerced to the Number type and then negated. In the example above, because the value of a is a string that can be converted to a number, the +a expression results in the value -10 and the value of b ends up as -5.

This behaviour is described in the specification (ES5 §11.4.7):

The production UnaryExpression : - UnaryExpression is evaluated as follows:

1. Let expr be the result of evaluating UnaryExpression.
2. Let oldValue be ToNumber(GetValue(expr)).
3. If oldValue is NaN, return NaN.
4. Return the result of negating oldValue; that is, compute a Number with the same magnitude but opposite sign.

However, when the subtraction operator is used adjacent to the unary - operator an unforunate resemblance to the decrement operator arises. The decrement operator, --, is used to subtract 1 from its operand. It can be used as a postfix or prefix operator which means it can appear after or before its operand. This makes the above example slightly confusing on first glance.

To resolve this issue the easiest fix is to wrap the unary expression in parentheses to disambiguate the - characters:

var a = "10",
    b = 5 - (-a);

In JSHint 1.0.0 and above you have the ability to ignore any warning with a special option syntax. The identifier of this warning is W006. This means you can tell JSHint to not issue this warning with the /*jshint -W006 */ directive.