So a Reduced Instruction Set Computer with a superfluous instruction that even x86_64 doesn’t have? 🤔
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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Programming
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wait until you hear about jazelle
If only we had built the web on top of a language that did not have such insane handling of its numbers in the first place...
Could you recommend a language with a sane handling of 64b-NaN-to-32b-int conversion?
There are tons of languages that let you represent integers directly as integers rather than having everything be a float so that you do not have to worry about this problem at all.
So by insanity you mean having just one number type?
Yes. Types are good. Numeric operations have specific hardware behavior that depends on whether you're using floating-point or not. Having exclusively floating-point semantics is wildly wrong for a programming language.
@BatmanAoD IMHO both JavaScript and PHP were hacks. When introduced they were indeed excellent hacks, making difficult things possible for the first time. In as sane world they would have been discarded as prototypes, but once human greed enters the picture (and in the capitalist world that is ALL the time) sense goes out of the window and the gold rush begins. This is far from a new story (cf. California 1849).
I have managed to mostly avoid needing to code in either language, but my strong inclination is to agree that they are indeed hacks.
Types are good
Opinions vary on this topic, apparently. There’s a proliferation of untyped languages.
There's a proliferation of dynamically and/or softly typed languages. There are very few, if any, truly untyped languages. (POSIX shells come close, though internally they have at least two types, strings and string-arrays, even if the array type isn't directly usable without non-POSIX features.)
TCL & CMake are fully stringly typed. Both pretty terrible languages (though TCL can at least claim to be a clever hack that was taken far too seriously).
Oof, yeah, those count. The fact that CMake was best-in-class when I wrote C++ professionally was...awful.
Forth is arguably an example of a truly untyped language.
The whole reason why an entire instruction was added to ARM to facilitate conversion to integers is because people need integer semantics from their numbers and so the language has to support this efficiently. Thus, in practice there already two number types, it's just that they have been merged together in this incredibly messy way so that you have the worst of both worlds.
JS just implicitly does what you, typed language developer, would have to do explicitly
JS just implicitly does what
…it wants, also sometimes it's far from what you want or even could expect
Yeah. I think the smallest number of number types you can reasonably have is two - f64 and arbitrary precision integers types. One of the few good decisions Python made.
I wonder how it is with nan etc in other languages
I’d definitely read a blog post about this, so if you decide to look into it you should write something up and post it. Maybe it’s standards based?
I don’t think I’ll dive deeper than quoting Wikipedia:
Most fixed-size integer formats cannot explicitly indicate invalid data. In such a case, when converting NaN to an integer type, the IEEE 754 standard requires that the invalid-operation exception be signaled.
For example in Java, such operations throw instances of java.lang.ArithmeticException.
In C, they lead to undefined behavior, but if annex F is supported, the operation yields an "invalid" floating-point exception (as required by the IEEE standard) and an unspecified value.
In the R language, the minimal signed value (i.e. 0x80000000) of integers is reserved for NA (Not available).[citation needed] Conversions from NaN (or double NA) to integers then yield a NA integer.
Perl's Math::BigInt package uses "NaN" for the result of strings that do not represent valid integers.