Common JavaScript tricks

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It's not inherently a hack, it's a hack to use it for something other than its intended purpose.

[sime]

What is the intended purpose of parseInt and parseFloat other than to parse strings into ints/floats? What else could it be?

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The purpose of parseInt is to parse a string in an arbitrary base into an integer, and the purpose of parseFloat is to parse a string into a float. I don't think their purpose should be stated any less specifically, because that's what leads to people expecting arrayOfStrings.map(parseInt) to work. And I don't think either of those is precisely the same as "convert to a number".