I read this and having admired sauoq's cleverness, got to thinking about a minor bug bear of mine down the years in various programming languages, namely the question on the title of this post.

I've long held the belief that as X/X is 1 for any other value of X, including (I believe) such exotics as infinity /infinity in those weird equations that theoretical physicists love to throw around, shouldn't computer languages like Perl (the obligatory tenuous link:^) treat 0 /0 as a special case and resolve it to 1?

At least that would give correct meaning to the currently misleading message Perl issues: "Illegal division by zero at...". I mean, doesn't saying that imply that at least one case of division by zero isn't illegal?

Cor! Like yer ring! ... HALO dammit! ... 'Ave it yer way! Hal-lo, Mister la-de-da. ... Like yer ring!

In reply to What is zero divided by zero anyway? by BrowserUk

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