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Comment by PhineasRex | Hacker News Reader

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PhineasRex·

"While often derided as a toy"

Javascript is not a toy; toys are fun.

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I like JavaScript but that did make me laugh.

What could be more fun than a language that says the result of dividing by 0 is "Infinity"? It's a hoot!!

That's from IEEE 754 (a standard for floating-point arithmetic). `NaN` and -0 exist for the same reason.

To be fair, just because something is a standard doesn't mean it isn't a dumb implementation. Just by testing the programming languages on my computer, I can tell you that Python, C, and D all throw errors rather than allow it, which is the smart thing to do.

> I can tell you that Python, C, and D all throw errors rather than allow it

Python throws an error, but numpy.divide(1., 0) will work just fine (and return inf).

I'm not sure why you're saying C throws an error. The behavior of dividing by 0 is undefined by default, but on most machines these days the hardware implements IEE-754 and the C implementation will advertise as implementing IEC 60559, so 1. / 0 will give you inf as well.

Trying to compile a test program with Clang threw errors, and bringing up numpy is disingenuous.

Are you sure you were using floating point math? Compiling 1.0 / 0.0 should not give errors or warnings. 1 / 0 will, on the other hand.

I know, I was just joshing! Man, you guys really didn't like that one. Personally I enjoy taking a moment now and then to reflect on some of the sillier aspects of JS. This is because I love JS, not because I hate it.

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