If this were Ada, I suppose we'd just constant fold 1/0 into die 'Illegal division by zero
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- In Ada, a division by zero would be caught at compile time and turned into a runtime error.
- In plain terms
- Ada would turn 1/0 into a compile‑time error.
- What can you take from it?
- Use languages that detect illegal operations early.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- What are the trade‑offs of compile‑time versus runtime checks?
- How does language choice impact safety?
Another view
Not all languages can catch every runtime error at compile time.
More from Larry Wall
Portability should be the default.
Permalink to quote #171 Are you perchance running on a 64-bit machine?
Permalink to quote #173 And other operators aren't so special syntactically, but weird in other ways, like 'scalar', and 'goto'.
Permalink to quote #170
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It's there as a sop to former Ada programmers. :-)
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