> 1 / 0
Infinity
> 0 * -1
-0
Yesterday I learned about the concepts of the global constant Infinity and the existince of -0 in Javascript. Despite working with the language for most of my career, it still finds ways to suprise me.
Infinity is a globally defined constant in the ECMAScript 5 specification. It's nice to have a mathmatical guarentee of largeness, rather than having to use Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER and account for any edge cases. It's also handy to have around to represent the outcome of what would otherwise be mathmatical party crashers in other languages, like dividing by zero.
> 1 / 0
Infinity
> Infinity > Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER
true
> 0 / 0
NaN
> Infinity * 0
NaN
Infinity also has it's mirror, -Infinity (Or Number.NEGATIVE_INFINITY if you'd rather not trust the negative sign next to a constant). Handy when you're doing comparisons in the negative direction.
> -1 / 0
-Infinity
> -Infinity < Number.MIN_SAFE_INTEGER
true
Treating Infinity as a number will solve some problems, but could cause others depending on how you use it. Infinity / Infinity is labeled as NaN, which while arguably true in a mathmatical sense doesn't really hold if Infinity is a number. If you divided Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER by itself after all, you'd still get 1.
> Infinity / 0
Infinity
> Infinity / Infinity
NaN
Stringifying Infinity can be a sensitive endeavor. String interpolation yields "Infinity", while JSON stringifying strangely yields "null". Pay attention to how your results are serialized.
> JSON.stringify(Infinity)
"null"
> `${Infinity}`
"Infinity"
While its arguable whether negative zero exists as a mathmatical concept, it most definitely exists in Javascript. You can obtain negative zero through any multiplication or division operation with zero that would yield a negative with any other number, and remove it by repeating the operation.
> 0 * -1
-0
> 0 / -1
-0
> -0 / -1
0
Unlike infinity, the negative aspect of -0 won't usually survive stringification.
> JSON.stringify(-0);
"0"
> `${-0}`
"0"
While I'm having a tough time replicating it, I have seen -0 preserved in rendered html in a React application. If you happen to know of other situations where -0 can be stringified, I'd be interested to hear.
-0 has the odd property of being strictly equal to (positive) 0. This makes it the only non-identity strictly equal relationship that I know about in JS. It can also make it hard to detect if you want to account for it in an edge case.
> 0 === -0
true
> -0 * -1 === 0
true
> 0 * -1 === 0
true
If you do want to test for -0, you can use division to yield either Infinity or -Infinity.
> 1 / 0 === Infinity
true
> 1 / -0 === Infinity
false
> 1 / -0 === -Infinity
true
Next time a number mysteriously becomes negative in your algorithm, be sure to check the zeros.