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From: Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.javascript
Subject: Re: How would you prepare for javascripting interview?
Date: Sat, 10 Sep 2016 15:49:56 +0100
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John Harris <niam@jghnorth.org.uk.invalid> writes:

> On Sat, 10 Sep 2016 02:14:36 -0000 (UTC), Scott Sauyet
> <scott@sauyet.com> wrote:
>
>   <snip>
>>-Infinity is a number.  It's a valid number that can be used in 
>>comparisons, in further `max` calls, even in much arithmetic.  Granted, 
>>it might not be the best for final displays, but as these should always 
>>be pushed to the edges of your program, it's pretty easy to handle these 
>>in a single place.
>   <snip>
>
> -Infinity is an ECMAScript Number, but not a genuine number (lower
> case n), though it is sometimes used in maths to signal don't know,
> undefined, keep going, etc.

Since the discussion is about ECMAScript, using -Infinity makes perfect
sense.  What's more, ECMAScript states when the result of arithmetic
operations will be +/-Infinity, and it mandates what results are to
returned from expressions involving these quantities.

> If you want a number it would be far more logical to use
> -Number.MAX_VALUE. If the application is restricted to integers then
> that would be -Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER.

Then, for some values of list, you could have

  Math.max.apply(null, []) > Math.max.apply(null, list)

If Math.max is going to return a value at all (and I think it's
reasonable to do so) the -Infinity is the only reasonable choice.

-- 
Ben.