NaNs Just Don't Get No Respect

[Walter Bright]

On 8/18/2012 6:51 AM, Peter Alexander wrote:
> Maybe it's related to the tendency for programmers to be libertarians, which
> would also explain the whole open source software movement. They want to share
> knowledge freely, and online articles would be part of that.

I find this peculiar, as the open source software movement is frequently 
associated with communism, not libertarianism. (Although I do think it is much 
more correct to associate it with libertarianism.)

> This reason likely
> explains this particular article: there was disagreement on the use of NaNs for
> initialisation, so Walter wanted to express his take on the matter to the
> masses. I have done similar things in the past, e.g. blogging about my thoughts
> on immutable in D.

I write the blogs in Dr. Dobbs because the editors of DDJ have always been very 
nice to me and supportive of my efforts, going all the way back to my Zortech 
days. They asked me to write the blogs, and send me nice comments about them. 
The positive responses they get on reddit encourage me to continue doing them.

I wrote the NaN one because there was a lot of interesting discussion on it in 
the n.g., and so I thought a wider audience would find it interesting as well.