Not a number "NaN" and "Infinity" make the number keyboard appear

[anon82626866]

Use this template to make NaN bug reports:

Your username: NTh3R

What kind of device are you using?: iPad 6th gen, iPadOS 15.0.1

1 sentence description of the problem (I was doing _________, and then __________ happened): I was coding when i noticed “NaN” (not a number) is considered as a number.

Steps that the Hopscotch team can take to reproduce my problem every time:

1. Create a set text block
2. Write NaN in it
3. Quit the block
4. Click on it to edit the text again and it considers not a number as a number
   ….

I expected this to happen: not a number is not a number

But instead this happened: not a number is a number

Here’s a sweet screenshot:

NaN

NaNN

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[anon82626866]

• It happens to me
• NaN

[Crosbyman64]

It might be recognizing it as a “Not a Number” Error Code.

It may also be because it’s used to compensate for imaginary (complex) numbers from equations like √(-1) //returns NaN on HS

[William04GamerA]

Hopscotch’s webplayer uses the programming language JavaScript, which (ironically) considers “NaN”/Not a Number to have the same type as “regular” numbers. This means that it is the same for everyone using the language, but it is still possible that THT could implement some checks to get around this since JavaScript contains functions for checking if a number is NaN. I’m not sure what they currently do, though.

Here’s a demonstration of how JavaScript treats NaN. It’s a bit technical but some may understand:

> number = NaN
NaN
> typeof(number)
'number'

[Electogenius]

NaN in JavaScript is considered a number because statements like "hello" * 839 still have a to return a number, but JavaScript can’t multiply with strings and still end up with a number. So they return NaN.
But this is hopscotch and JavaScript features shouldn’t be used, tht should probably make a workaround for this lol

[cool12317282728]

Yet they still don’t return the square root of negative one as imaginary

[Crosbyman64]

True, but some HS coding can fix that

If the number under the radical is less than 0, then return as

((√(abs(number))) + (i)) // √(-4) would return 2i instead of NaN like it normally does in this case. I made a system like this in my Advanced Function Calculator.

[t1_hopscotch]

So I guess what is going on is that the numeric keyboard pops up for NaN, since it considers it to be a number.

Since NaN is considered a number type in JavaScript, I think it is not really unintended behaviour, so I will close this topic

[Awesome_E]

While NaN is considered to be type number in most programming languages, Hopscotch doesn’t really have an intended way to show NaN, and the player parses it as a string type ^[1], not a number type. This should be consistent in the editor.

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1. example: NaN + 3 = NaN in most languages, but Hopscotch treats NaN like a string, so it results in NaN3 ↩︎

[Bobinny]

Should this be closed? Again

[Awesome_E]

Well, if you type NaN into a parameter, exit it, and tap into it again, does it show the text keyboard?

[Bobinny]

No, the number keyboard.

[Awesome_E]

Then the bug still occurs and this should stay open

[Bobinny]

Works with infinity as well.

[t1_hopscotch]

I think this behaviour probably makes sense in the editor, since they are number types.

The bug/unexpected behaviour is in the player, which should treat NaN as a number. Perhaps a separate bug report can be made for this issue in the webplayer.

@Awesome_E

While NaN is considered to be type number in most programming languages, Hopscotch doesn’t really have an intended way to show NaN, and the player parses it as a string type [1], not a number type.

[Awesome_E]

So, does that mean we want to parse the strings NaN and Infinity as numbers if a user sets variables to those strings? If that’s the case, I agree and we should file an issue in the webplayer for that. Otherwise, if they’re still going to be treated as normal strings when a user enters those, then the bug is in the editor.