I'm currently reading through this jquery masking plugin to try and understand how it works, and in numerous places the author calls the slice() function passing no arguments to it. For instance here the _buffer variable is slice()d, and _buffer.slice() and _buffer seem to hold the same values.

Is there any reason for doing this, or is the author just making the code more complicated than it should be?

 //functionality fn

 function unmaskedvalue($input, skipDatepickerCheck) {

     var input = $input[0];

     if (tests && (skipDatepickerCheck === true || !$input.hasClass('hasDatepicker'))) {

         var buffer = _buffer.slice();

         checkVal(input, buffer);

         return $.map(buffer, function(element, index) {

             return isMask(index) && element != getBufferElement(_buffer.slice(), index) ? element : null; }).join('');

    }

    else {

        return input._valueGet();

    }

}