Yuck. Division by zero is an unfortunate reality but basically nobody with mathematical background thinks that just defining x/0 = 0 is a good solution.
Often in numerical computing, getting an NaN or Inf is a blessing in that it’s a hint that your algorithm is numerically buggy, in the same way that a crash or a exception would indicate a program bug.
This approach is the numeric equivalent of a program continuing on after an undefined variable, just assuming it’s 0. That was tried by scripting languages in the 90s and these days most folks think it was a bad approach.
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From the tutorial:
// Division by zero is not an error
io.debug(3.14 /. 0.0)
It prints 0
Yuck. Division by zero is an unfortunate reality but basically nobody with mathematical background thinks that just defining x/0 = 0 is a good solution.
Often in numerical computing, getting an NaN or Inf is a blessing in that it’s a hint that your algorithm is numerically buggy, in the same way that a crash or a exception would indicate a program bug.
This approach is the numeric equivalent of a program continuing on after an undefined variable, just assuming it’s 0. That was tried by scripting languages in the 90s and these days most folks think it was a bad approach.