Sounds like a good place for "fail", as described in Exegesis 4, so that it could be taken as undef or an exception depending on pragmata.
> This came up at YAPC::Europe. Someone [1] wanted to know if 1/0 would > produce a divide by zero error in Perl 6, or if it would return a value > representing an indeterminate result (undef?) It would make more sense for > Perl, upon being given a simple bit of impossible math, to return undef > (like other functions do on failure) than to generate an error. The error > seems a throwback to earlier days of hardwired calculators. > > If nothing else it would make guarding against indeterminate math easier. > Rather than the user having to trap an error, or do possibly complicated > work to see if any of the denominators might be zero, you can just see if > the result is undef. > > > [1] I apologize for forgetting who. > > [2] Discussion of divide by zero and why it's not infinity [3] > http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.divideby0.html > > [3] I was always taught it's infinity. > > -- > > Michael G. Schwern <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/ > Perl Quality Assurance <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kwalitee Is Job One > Don't worry, baby, my wrath can be pretty groovy. > http://www.goats.com/archive/980804.html > -- Adam Lopresto ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://cec.wustl.edu/~adam/ Who are you and what have you done with reality? --Jamin Gray
