Friday, January 20, 2006

Something that irks me a little that I just need to throw that out

I hate the fact that 0 / 0 != 0.

Why? It breaks all graph plotting programs. Particularly gnuplot.

4 comments:

Rico said...

using my trusty windows calculator I get "Result of function is undefined" :-).

Anonymous said...

The answer is 1 right!?

Patrick said...

it's undefined

Anonymous said...

Well, you can cheat it a little if you were making a program to handle this. Make your own function that makes everything with 0 in the numerator or the denominator if you wish = 0. I would just look at the numerator though and automatically make it = 0. Yeah, math dorks will tell you it's undefined when the denominator is 0, but in the real world we know it should mean 0.


You reminded me of all those equations I used to see in the math lab's bathroom about how 1 != 1 using some bad algebra or taking a different result possibility of a square root on each side.