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the hardest exam question (lemmy.ml)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago (3 children)

NaN is of type number. because fuck me.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago

IEEE-754

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago

To be fair, this is actually reasonable. But it does look stupid on the face of it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

When my console throws a NaN I kinda think of it as an Halloween kid receiving a fruit instead of a candy. They won’t say “That’s a fruit”. They’ll say “That’s not a treat”.

I’m personally pissed more often by a falsy 0.

Did you know that early analog computers would literally explode when asked to divide by 0?

Now computers just say “Hey stupid, that shit is not even a Number in a mathematical sense, but sure I’ll add one to it.” instead of “Why would you kill me like this?”

You can’t really define Infinity as a number, yet it is part of their world.

So typeof NaN === ‘number’ totally makes sense in that regard.

If you ever worked with arrays of dates, don’t judge NaN too harshly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Falsy zero? What's wrong with that, 1 is true and 0 is false. I thought that was standard logic?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

in javascript a property is truthy if it exists

myThing.property = "some string"

if (myThing.property) { // true
  // do something
}

It works with everything except of course for falsy values

myThing.number = someNumberThatShouldNotBeEqualToZero

if (myThing.number) {
  // do something very important with that number that should not be equal to zero
}

// This can fail at anytime without warning

So you've got to be extra careful with that logic when you're dealing with numbers.

I am not saying it's wrong though. I'm saying it's often annoying.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

ah ok , I think I write this a bit more verbose when using other languages, instead of

if(thing)
{
   stuff;
}

I do


if(thing != null)
{
   stuff;
}

so checking for numbers being truthy & existing didn't seem like an issue

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

In the case of a non-existing property, the value would be undefined rather than null.

And while == and != exist in JavaScript, most linters will throw an error and require a === and !== instead as they should be avoided.

null == undefined // true
null === undefined // false

Besides, null is a perfectly valid value for a property, just as 0. Working with API Platform, I couldn't tell the number of times I used this kind of statement:

if (property || property === null) {
  // do some stuff
}

Probably just as much as

if (property || property === 0) {
  // do some stuff
}