This is "Worse is Better[1]" engineering at its most infamous. In order to make the interface consistent and simple you take the exceptional case and just make

This is "Worse is Better[1]" engineering at its most infamous. In order to make the interface consistent and simple you take the exceptional case and just make it work the same as all the other cases. It goes with the "Worse is better" credo that "it is slightly better to be simple than to be correct". Also "it is better to drop those parts of the design that deal with less common circumstances than to introduce either complexity or inconsistency in the implementation". So throwing an exception on division by zero or returning some complex thing like NaN is too much complexity, so we just return 0. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better