(silent tears of joy)

(Not a JS'er) You can pass a comment as a parameter?

not in the language itself, but you can obtain the full text of a function, detect the comment and parse it, and inject it where ever it needs to go.

Yep. "Passing a comment" is used by calling .toString() on the function. It fails when using minification for obvious reasons but of course you wouldn't on Node code.

It's a clever hack around JS's awful multiline string support. But with ES6 template strings it's not really needed anymore.

You can, but I'm a little confused as to why you would, instead of just passing a string.

Fits in with the esoteric nature of the library, though.

Possibly because multiline strings are not supported?

ES6 template strings can span multiple lines.

Every time I was reading about old COBOL systems, I was wondering if we can compile COBOL to asm.js, this is slightly other direction but IMHO this topic requires more love.

Wow, match made in heaven!

But why?

The same reason you could write part of your site in COBOL (Micro Focus) because you have a large body of legacy and need to get to the web.

It gives you a way to connect your enterprise system to your corporate intranet.

Seems like a pretty stupid way to do it. Why not just use the raw data from the data files or direct access to the DB/2 database? Does this even handle the ebcdic to ascii conversion? Or packed decimal numbers?

Atwood's Law

Uh... Neat?