> He thought 1/0 should be 0 rather than an error because "that's what people expect"
So I saw this in action once, and it created a mess. Private company had a stupid stock dividend mechanism: every shareholder received some fraction, dependent on fundraising, of a recurring floating pool of shares, quantity dependent on operating performance. (TL; DR Capital was supposed to fundraise, management was supposed to operate. It was stupid.)
One quarter, the divisor was zero for reasons I can't remember. This should have resulted in no stock dividend. Instead, the cap-table manager issued zero-share certificates to everyone. By Murphy's Law, this occured on the last quarter of the company's fiscal year.
Zero-share certificates are used for one purpose: to help a shareholder prove to an authority that they no longer own any shares. Unlike normal share certificates, which are additive, a zero-share certificate doesn't add zero shares to your existing shares; it ambiguously negates them. In essence, on that day, the cap-table manager sent every shareholder a notice that looked like their shares had been cancelled. Because their system thought 1 / 0 = 0.
If you're dividing by zero in a low-impact system, it really doesn't matter what you output. Zero. Infinity. Bagel. If you're doing so in a physical or financial or other high-impact system, the appropriate output is confused puppy.
So I saw this in action once, and it created a mess. Private company had a stupid stock dividend mechanism: every shareholder received some fraction, dependent on fundraising, of a recurring floating pool of shares, quantity dependent on operating performance. (TL; DR Capital was supposed to fundraise, management was supposed to operate. It was stupid.)
One quarter, the divisor was zero for reasons I can't remember. This should have resulted in no stock dividend. Instead, the cap-table manager issued zero-share certificates to everyone. By Murphy's Law, this occured on the last quarter of the company's fiscal year.
Zero-share certificates are used for one purpose: to help a shareholder prove to an authority that they no longer own any shares. Unlike normal share certificates, which are additive, a zero-share certificate doesn't add zero shares to your existing shares; it ambiguously negates them. In essence, on that day, the cap-table manager sent every shareholder a notice that looked like their shares had been cancelled. Because their system thought 1 / 0 = 0.
If you're dividing by zero in a low-impact system, it really doesn't matter what you output. Zero. Infinity. Bagel. If you're doing so in a physical or financial or other high-impact system, the appropriate output is confused puppy.