in reply to Re: Re: More Fun with Zero!
in thread More Fun with Zero!
In that case the computer should give up because the real answer might be anywhere between 0 and 1 inclusive.
Therefore of his examples, all of the answers make sense. The two products which are designed to be working with floating point extensively (ie Excel and his calculators) think in terms of round-off error and decide that they cannot give a reasonable answer. The remaining products are all programming tools, dealing with integers, and are assuming for one reason or another that they are dealing with an exact integer calculation. So all of them give back the answer 1.
(OK, I admit it, probably the calculators and Excel were designed by people who remembered that 00 was an indeterminate form but have no idea what that really means. But there are calculational contexts in which failing to give an answer in that case makes sense.)
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Re: Re (tilly) 3: More Fun with Zero!
by John M. Dlugosz (Monsignor) on Jul 24, 2001 at 00:58 UTC | |
by tilly (Archbishop) on Jul 24, 2001 at 06:41 UTC |