the secret life of NaN
▻https://anniecherkaev.com/the-secret-life-of-nan
The floating point standard defines a special value called Not-a-Number (NaN) which is used to represent, well, values that aren’t numbers. Double precision NaNs come with a payload of 51 bits which can be used for whatever you want– one especially fun hack is using the payload to represent all other non-floating point values and their types at runtime in dynamically typed languages.
the non-secret life of NaN When I say “NaN” and also “floating point”, I specifically mean the representations defined in IEEE 754-2008, the ubiquitous floating point standard. This standard was born in 1985 (with much drama!) out of a need for a canonical representation which would allow code to be portable by quelling the anarchy induced by the menagerie of inconsistent floating point representations used by (...)
