Yeah, I don’t think I’d use unary plus either, but sometimes a use case presents itself for unexpected things. I certainly didn’t know about it, and now I do, so I’ve learned something.
I think partly the dislike of it comes from its unfamiliarity. We don’t see it in common use very often, whereas the old value * 1 trick for type coercion is scattered throughout the internet. While you could certainly debate the wisdom of that technique, I’d imagine most developers would understand the intent immediately when they see it — largely because it’s an old and well-known shortcut. But on the face of it, multiplying something by 1 could seem a pretty pointless thing to do.
This is all a great example of the fact that what we think of as intuitive as often really just what we learned through repetition and convention.
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Ahh yeah, I forgot about the fact that
parseIntignores anything non-numeric after a number.I would still rather use
Number(value)to+valueto clarify intent.Yeah, I don’t think I’d use unary plus either, but sometimes a use case presents itself for unexpected things. I certainly didn’t know about it, and now I do, so I’ve learned something.
I think partly the dislike of it comes from its unfamiliarity. We don’t see it in common use very often, whereas the old value * 1 trick for type coercion is scattered throughout the internet. While you could certainly debate the wisdom of that technique, I’d imagine most developers would understand the intent immediately when they see it — largely because it’s an old and well-known shortcut. But on the face of it, multiplying something by 1 could seem a pretty pointless thing to do.
This is all a great example of the fact that what we think of as intuitive as often really just what we learned through repetition and convention.