Geek Speak
Swear to God, last week sometime I was copied (along with numerous others) on an email from a developer. It went something like this:
The code checks the value after converting the string to a floating point value. Should there be a divide by zero error, I _assume_ that the IM will stop processing the module and return, causing the middle of the page to be blank.
The error occurs because I am using dot notation to access the values,
i.e. object.FIELD_NAME. In this case I should have used object[FIELD_NAME]. (For you bitheads, I declare the fieldname as a
constant at the top of the script.) I suspect that what is happening is
that the reference is returning null. Math.parseFloat, which converts the
string to a floating point number is then converting null to NaN, (not a
number). This value is compared to numeric 0, and returns false. Since
I test for ‘not equals’, this would, in this case, return true. So the
result is as if I never tested for zero at all.
ummm… yeah… say what? I was forced to reply: in English please, but what I really meant was: and I care about this because… ?? Eventually, it was explained to me that whatever the above says was causing errors to fill the server error logs and the Great Gods of the Servers Logs* were rumbling with anger. Now that I can get my head around.
* people I don’t know and would be frightened to meet. I’m sure they sit in a basement somewhere with no natural light sources.
posted by that girl.. @ 10:19 PM
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