Grain: A strongly-typed functional programming language for the modern web

Re:Grain: A strongly-typed functional programming language f... by kazagistar on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @10:13AM (#17653270)

Closure is only good in programming if the answers it gives are always useful. Otherwise, you run into the same non local error problem that plagues nulls: the error still happens, but now it happens at some distant usage site, far away from the cause.

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Re:Grain: A strongly-typed functional programming language f... by zachrose on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @07:16PM (#17667932)

Good point. This is exactly what JavaScript does with NaN and the set of numbers, and errors are harder to track down because of it.

Computer numbers in general have all sorts of issues like this where clean mathematical theory is broken. NaN, Infinity and -Infinity, for example, are all similar to absorbing elements[1] under multiplication in the sense that once you get that as a result, you can't do the inverse operation (division) to get back to your original inputs.

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