News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:1/0 = 0 by emileokada on Friday August 10, 2018 @05:15PM (#17736799)
This is not true if you say division by 0 is undefined or +inf either. It really is totally fine.
Re:1/0 = 0 by ggggtez on Friday August 10, 2018 @05:23PM (#17736854)
No, you are assuming that 1/0= "undefined" where "undefined" is a magical value. It's not. It literally means 'That operation has no definition, and there is no reasonable result to return'.

Many languages handle this in a practical way by creating a special value "undefined", "NaN", or others that has special properties. But let's be clear that "0" is a normal number in the real number space, as so expectations about properties of real numbers are not going to hold up.

Re:1/0 = 0 by wan23 on Friday August 10, 2018 @05:58PM (#17737023)
When there is no reasonable result to return does it really matter what result is returned? 1 / 0 == 0 is about the same as 1 / 0 == 3. To avoid this just don't do 1 / 0 in your program.
Re:1/0 = 0 by lmm on Friday August 10, 2018 @06:37PM (#17737198)
> 1 / 0 == 0 is about the same as 1 / 0 == 3

Sure, and both are bad.

> To avoid this just don't do 1 / 0 in your program.

If you're going to avoid doing it, better to have it throw an exception if you do it by accident.