Austin Schutz wrote:
This is not related to the original topic, but I've always wondered this: In math a number divided by 0 is "undefined". Why is it that in a language which has an undefined value does the interpreter poop out rather than just having the intuitively obvious behavior of returning undef? Is that really by design, or just a legacy quirk they're afraid to fix?
Austin
Which would you prefer?
$ perl -le '$x=1/0; print $x+1' Illegal division by zero at -e line 1.
or
$ perl -le '$x=1/0; print $x+1' 1
It only makes sense if "undef" in any arithmetic operation always gives "undef", which means that all variables have to be explicitly initialized to zero before you can perform any arithmetic on them. That breaks tons of useful idioms and generally adds programming overhead.
You shouldn't confuse "undefined" meaning "not definable" (math) with "not yet defined" (Perl).
David
