Hacker News·5 min read·hard
Two Case Studies of NaN
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theanonymousone✦AI Summary
This article explores how the IEEE-754 'Not a Number' (NaN) value creates unexpected behavior in programming languages like Python and Lua. It demonstrates how implicit assumptions about equality and iteration logic fail when encountering NaN.
IEEE-754 NaN is weird. and because of that, it's often accidentally left unaccounted for. i found two instances of this leaking into programming language design. that is, the semantics of these languages hold implicit assumptions which break with NaN.
technologyscience
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