I'm a Systems Reliability and DevOps engineer for Netdata Inc. When not working, I enjoy studying linguistics and history, playing video games, and cooking all kinds of international cuisine.
Most languages do this, but it could be a whole lot worse (fun fact, IEEE 754 actually allows for (2 ^ N) - 1 distinct NaN values not counting signed NaN values, where N is the bit width of the significand field in the binary representation (so for the 8-byte floats JS uses, there are 18014398509481982 possible NaN values including both signed values)).
The reason is simple, NaN is a numeric representation of a non-numeric value, so by definition it has to be the same type as numbers for the language (or, at minimum, it has to be at least one of the numeric types in the language), but you can't be certain what value it is, so you can't treat two NaN values as being identical.
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Most languages do this, but it could be a whole lot worse (fun fact, IEEE 754 actually allows for (2 ^ N) - 1 distinct
NaNvalues not counting signedNaNvalues, where N is the bit width of the significand field in the binary representation (so for the 8-byte floats JS uses, there are 18014398509481982 possible NaN values including both signed values)).The reason is simple,
NaNis a numeric representation of a non-numeric value, so by definition it has to be the same type as numbers for the language (or, at minimum, it has to be at least one of the numeric types in the language), but you can't be certain what value it is, so you can't treat twoNaNvalues as being identical.