Re: Infinity vs Error for division by zero

On Friday, March 1, 2019, Matt Pulver <mpulver(at)unitytechgroup(dot)com> wrote:

> However the query "SELECT 1.0/0.0;" produces an exception:
>
> ERROR: division by zero
>
>
> Question: If Infinity and NaN are supported, then why throw an exception
> here, instead of returning Infinity? Is it purely for historical reasons,
> or if it could all be done again, would an exception still be preferred?
>
> For purely integer arithmetic, I can see how an exception would make
> sense. However for FLOAT, I would expect/prefer Infinity to be returned.
>

1/0 is an illegal operation. We could return NaN for it but the choice of
throwing an error is just as correct. Returning infinity is strictly
incorrect.

Changing the behavior is not going to happen for any existing data types.

David J.