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There's two competing software philosophies which are sometimes called "banker" and "moon rover." If you are writing a bank program, you want to catch errors im

There's two competing software philosophies which are sometimes called "banker" and "moon rover." If you are writing a bank program, you want to catch errors immediately, to ensure that mistakes can't silently propagate. But if you are writing a moon rover, under no circumstances abort: keep going no matter what! We have two Mars rovers right now, Opportunity and Curiosity. Fittingly, these use PowerPC chips, which are in the moon rover camp: divide-by-zero is zero. Really! Go get a PowerPC Mac, do a divide-by-zero, and you just silently get zero. Solution #1 baked into the ISA. Not many people seem to have noticed, so it can't have caused too much trouble. (Apologies for reposting my reddit comment here)

byuu 12y ago
Yep, this is also the case with some gaming systems; eg the SNES CPU's ALU, and also its Sony APU (SPC700). Division by zero continues on instead of crashing. They usually return 0 for the quotient, and ~0 ("-1") for the remainder. So if it's not too much work, I'd like my language to give me the option based on the type of application I want. But if it were forced to be a choice, I'd probably err on the side of safety.