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0 pointsdnautics4mo ago0 comments

it's terrible advice for actual programmers though because often 0 is a sentinel value with special meaning for systems that you don't have control over (sometimes because of pre-digital conventions that shouldn't be lightly fucked with).

This is usually done by PL's that want to avoid crashes at all costs, but "turning crashes into subtle logic errors" seems like a really bad idea.

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teiferer4mo ago

Two quotes from the article you are criticizing:

"As a programmer, I don’t like it."

"As mentioned before, this is not a post about what’s practically a good idea. All I’m arguing is that mathematically, we can extend division in this way without leading to a contradiction. Programming languages are different from mathematical formalisms, and should be different. I prefer that 1/0 is an error, because I’m not using my program to prove theories."

Please do yourself a favor and actually read it.

Besides, 0 as a sentinental value on disk or on the wire is fine, but once you have values in a programming language, use option types. This is not 1980s anymore, you don't need to use 0 or -1 or 0xffff to express something special which sooner or later just falls on your feet.

dnauticsOP4mo ago

I read the article. As someone who was a math major I get why it's "fine". But nowhere in the article does hillel explain WHY it's bad for a real pl. (And defenders of e.g. pony gleam point to this article too to say it's okay. It's not.) I am adding context.

> This is not 1980s anymore, you don't need to use 0 or -1 or 0xffff to express something special which sooner or later just falls on your feet.

No. You missed the whole "real world systems". E.g. like stock trading, where zero stock trades are tombstones.

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