Defining and calling function in one step
You can try:
(window.powers = function(i) { /*Code here*/ alert('test : ' + i);})(2);<a href="#" onclick="powers(654)">Click</a>Working link : http://jsfiddle.net/SqBp8/
It gets called on load, and I have added it to an anchor tag to change the parameter and alert.
If all you want is access the function within its own body, you can simply specify a name after the function keyword:
> (function fac (n) { return (n === 0 ? 1 : n*fac(n-1)); })(10)3628800This is a standard feature (see ECMA-262, ed. 5.1, p. 98).
All the answers here are close to what you want, but have a few problems (adding it to the global scope, not actually calling it, etc). This combines a few examples on this page (although it unfortunately requires you to remember arguments.callee):
var test = (function() { alert('hi'); return arguments.callee;})();Later, you can call it:
test();