NaNs, Infinities, and Negative Numbers In Loan Calculators

I’ve encountered several NaNs over the years in the normal course of using various websites and apps. I’ve only documented two of them: one in a media player, and one in a podcast app. I recently ran into another one using a loan calculator website. Rather than reporting on just that one, I decided to look for more and report on anything I found all at once.

I found many more errors — NaNs, but also infinites, negative numbers, and one called “incomplete data”, whatever that means — all on websites within the top Google search results for “loan calculator”. All I had to do to elicit these errors was to enter large numbers. (And in one case, simply including a dollar sign.) All of the errors arise from the use of floating-point arithmetic combined with unconstrained input values. Some sites even let me enter numbers in scientific notation, like 1e308, or even displayed them as results.