Re: Thinking about MINUS
Date: 7 Jan 2007 12:09:00 -0800
Message-ID: <1168200540.103754.204710_at_s80g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>
On Jan 7, 10:54 am, paul c <toledobythe..._at_oohay.ac> wrote:
> Maybe, and I would be curious to see that definition work. I believe
> the conventional stance (ie., most products' stance) is that the result
> is undefined. If I have that right, my attitude is that means an
> implementation must support exceptions to handle it. Although I don't
> object to having exceptions if they give some programming or user
> safety, for some reason I can't explain, I don't like the idea of a
> system that allows undefined conditions to be produced and then must
> support exceptions to cope with them.
Exceptional conditions are an inescapable fact of life, alas. Consider
1/0.
Even if we consider a system consisting only of the natural numbers,
zero, successor and predecessor, we have to wrestle with the question
of what the predecessor of zero is.
Marshall Received on Sun Jan 07 2007 - 21:09:00 CET