this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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Programmer Humor

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[–] propter_hog@hexbear.net 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

'a' + +

This part is the same as writing 'a'++ and that returns "NaN" (short for "not a number") since you can't increment a character, but this return type is a string, so the interpreter just concatenates it with the other letters: baNaNa. Then that string is converted to lower case to give the final result, "banana".

[–] sgh@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The space makes that two different tokens, in reality what happens is 'a' + (+'a') that resolves to 'a' + 'NaN'.

[–] propter_hog@hexbear.net 2 points 1 week ago

Yep, I believe you're right

[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Ironically 'a'++ works in C/C++ because 'a' is char where in JS 'a' is string.