TypeScript 4.9: NaN sanity, finally!

TypeScript 4.9 is out, and it doesn’t let you use === and !== on NaN by default. Finally someone decided to do this, it’s a legitimately smart move.

This is also a “JavaScript variant” having better equality behavior than Haskell (nevermind my ancient GHC version, thankyouverymuch):

$ ghci
GHCi, version 8.10.7: https://www.haskell.org/ghc/  :? for help
Prelude> let x = 0.0 / 0.0
Prelude> x == x
False

Signed zeros, denormals, and infinities all make some sense in context of numerical analysis. But reflexivity is too strong a property to give up, and it’s pretty gross that vaunted Haskell does this with its values and == function.

Right from the start, these weird comparison operators that have no simple algebraic properties should have been floatLess instead of <, floatEquals instead of ==, etc. But we’re stuck with a horrible standard, and at least TypeScript can do minimally better.