This is incredibly funny, but does anyone know why the interpreter makes such bizarre decisions? Why wouldn't it be preferable to just throw up errors?
a = a
in your code, Ruby creates the variable a before it ever tries to actually execute the assignment. If later, when it has finished parsing everything, and starts executing, that statement fails because b is not defined, you still end up with variable a being defined, and since it has not had anything successfully assigned to it, it has a value of nil.The JavaScript stuff, I think, comes from operator overloading. The plus operator is overloaded to allow adding strings to concatenate them, and it will do type conversion to get compatible types, so "wat"+1 results in the 1 being converted to a string, and then the strings are concatenated. Since the minus operator is not so overloaded, "wat"-1 instead is treated as numerical subtraction. JavaScript allows string to be used as numbers, so "123"-1 gives 122. However "wat" is not a string that represents a number, so gives NaN when forced to be treated as a number, and "wat"-1 is thus NaN.