Rube Goldberg Code

[RavensFan]

I found this in a third party driver.

In the error case, it looks like the programmer wanted to output a Not a Number value.  Okay, that makes sense.

But instead of using an NaN value in a constant, why don't we just take the square root of -1?

 

[Ray.R]

OOoooooooooooooohhhh

That's just getting nasty ...  or quite imaginative...  Don't know which one to attribute that one to..

[tst]

The fact that you can type NaN into the numeric constant is not obvious.

[altenbach]

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@tst wrote:

The fact that you can type NaN into the numeric constant is not obvious.

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True. Many years ago I suggested to add a NaN constant to the numeric palette, e.g. next to the +Inf, -Inf constants. (That was way before the ideas exachange)

Maybe it's time to write a new idea... stay tuned. 😄

[JÞB]

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@Ravens Fan wrote:

I found this in a third party driver.

In the error case, it looks like the programmer wanted to output a Not a Number value.  Okay, that makes sense.

But instead of using an NaN value in a constant, why don't we just take the square root of -1?

 

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Spoiler

I've done that

[aeastet]

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@Jeff Bohrer wrote:

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@Ravens Fan wrote:

I found this in a third party driver.

In the error case, it looks like the programmer wanted to output a Not a Number value.  Okay, that makes sense.

But instead of using an NaN value in a constant, why don't we just take the square root of -1?

 

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Spoiler

I've done that

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Maybe you did do that.

[JÞB]

I'd NEVER leave a terminal as icon-

[Ray.R]

A classic Rube Goldberg:  http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/Conversion-d-un-String-en-tableau-de-doubles/m-p/1548410

[Ray.R]

Another RG that can be simplified using our friendly Regular Expressions:

http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/search-and-split-the-string/m-p/1548356

[Darin.K]

Oftentimes when using Search and Replace, a while loop is used when you can simply Replace All.

spotted here