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1/0 = 0
11–20 of 593 posts
Re: 1/0 = 0
#12> But is Pony doing something unsound? Absolutely not. It is totally fine to define 1/0 = 0. Nothing breaks It actually does break something, the symmetry between division and multiplication and the many pieces of code that assume that (x / y) * y equals x. Here is a naive and non practical example, but it is not impossible to find a real world example where this simplified code manifests itself accidentally or by de…
> (x / y) * y equals x
Even without Pony's assumption, that's only true when y != 0.
Re: 1/0 = 0
#13Some symbol is failing to render on my android phone.
Re: 1/0 = 0
#14> But is Pony doing something unsound? Absolutely not. It is totally fine to define 1/0 = 0. Nothing breaks It actually does break something, the symmetry between division and multiplication and the many pieces of code that assume that (x / y) * y equals x. Here is a naive and non practical example, but it is not impossible to find a real world example where this simplified code manifests itself accidentally or by de…
> the many pieces of code that assume that (x / y) * y equals x
The same issue if division by zero throws an exception. This is simply a more practical approach that dispenses with the exception handling (ie becomes a less irregular test case). Edit: Not buggy behavior, when expected.
Re: 1/0 = 0
#151/0 = 1(±∞) https://twitter.com/westurner/status/960508624849244160 > How many times does zero go into any number? Infinity. [...] > How many times does zero go into zero? infinity^2?
Zero goes into zero x times, for any real x. Infinity isn't real, therefore neither is infinity^2 so no.
Re: 1/0 = 0
#16It's like in Ruby, when you divide 3/2 you get 1 (integer division) which is almost never the behavior you want (unless you cast all you numbers to float which is a pain to do).
Re: 1/0 = 0
#17> But is Pony doing something unsound? Absolutely not. It is totally fine to define 1/0 = 0. Nothing breaks It actually does break something, the symmetry between division and multiplication and the many pieces of code that assume that (x / y) * y equals x. Here is a naive and non practical example, but it is not impossible to find a real world example where this simplified code manifests itself accidentally or by de…
I think OP means that nothing breaks mathematically. It is not inconsistent and not false, so you can work with it. The only issue is to deal specially with the case of division by zero, which you have to do anyways. Code that assumes that (x/y) * y = x is wrong if you don't check for y = 0, independently of what you define x/0 to be.
Re: 1/0 = 0
#18My two issue with this is it totally relies on a specially constructed definition, and it leads to unintuitive results. The issue with special definitions is you can use them to say anything you want, turning regular, common operations into weirdness. What does it mean to take a factorial on the real numbers, or to add only on the even integers? In both cases, we're twisting what are generally accepted mechanics and…
You may not be familiar but a "factorial on the real numbers" is the gamma function and it has all sorts of useful applications. (it works on real and complex numbers except for non-positive integers)
Re: 1/0 = 0
#19> But is Pony doing something unsound? Absolutely not. It is totally fine to define 1/0 = 0. Nothing breaks It actually does break something, the symmetry between division and multiplication and the many pieces of code that assume that (x / y) * y equals x. Here is a naive and non practical example, but it is not impossible to find a real world example where this simplified code manifests itself accidentally or by de…
I think OP means that nothing breaks mathematically. It is not inconsistent and not false, so you can work with it. The only issue is to deal specially with the case of division by zero, which you have to do anyways. Code that assumes that (x/y) * y = x is wrong if you don't check for y = 0, independently of what you define x/0 to be.
It is inconsistent. If 1/0 = 0, then 1 = 0*0.
Re: 1/0 = 0
#20> But is Pony doing something unsound? Absolutely not. It is totally fine to define 1/0 = 0. Nothing breaks It actually does break something, the symmetry between division and multiplication and the many pieces of code that assume that (x / y) * y equals x. Here is a naive and non practical example, but it is not impossible to find a real world example where this simplified code manifests itself accidentally or by de…
> the many pieces of code that assume that (x / y) * y equals x The same issue if division by zero throws an exception. This is simply a more practical approach that dispenses with the exception handling (ie becomes a less irregular test case). Edit: Not buggy behavior, when expected.
I would say an exception is much more convenient. Buggy code that silently continues to run is very hard to debug!