Party Vibe

@Tryptameanie 570480 wrote:

OK GL, in what special case does dividing by 0 give a reasonable answer?

pure maths is something I have never been that good at (another reason for my early exit from University as I would rather hack their computers and take drugs than learn calculus and complex numbers etc (still barely understand those) – the only reason I could think of would be to deliberately cause a computer to crash or behave strangely by causing it to divide by zero; but it seems modern software guards against this error.

Although Asian kids who get sent to Catholic schools do get a lot of arithmetic drummed into their heads (there are a lot of numbers in the Bible and things being counted all the time) that does not mean they are all maths geniuses; and some stuff the maths boffins think up confuses computer programmers (and many computers other than specialist ones for maths).

I became interested in computers as I realised “this machine can do all the arithmetic so I do not have to it myself; and the numbers can be used to make some screen displays or noise” but my maths skills are no better than they were in high school; and if I do not write down my workings I am liable to make all sorts of silly errors. (one recent clanger deserves a thread of its own as if it had been drugs the consequences of this unit error could have bee unpleasant).

I bought a cheap Japanese calculator (intended for high school age kids) at the shops as the one my Dad had left me is way too confusing and this one was more like what I used at high school – but it still confused me and Ihad to look in the manual to get it to display decimals instead of the fractions.

I did look up the “answer”; there is more than one depending on whether the definition of zero is approached from a pure maths viewpoint or a computer science. Digital Buddha is sort of right but some other Indian dude argued that it could give a false answer; and computers can now have +0 / -0 or a Nan (not a number); at least you can check for these unusual results.

@Digital Buddha 570694 wrote:

wait GL doesn’t have a Ti84 and never has had one? dude anyone who can plug and chug is a math genius with one; these cross cultural gaffes that we have as a global society sometimes blow my mind. what type of calculator is common in European schools?

for junior and high school in UK Casio are most commonly found, occasionally Sharp turns up.

if you mean “school” as in University level I think Casio still have a big market share; although occasionally HPs turn up but it tends to be the very dedicated/smart students who would use them and/or Scots people (as HP used to have a big factory there).

I didn’t even think TI still made calculators; the TI84 is an impressive piece of kit to be fair particularly for someone of my age group (whole Z80 crammed into it + colour display!) and it looks like it would just about fit a shirt pocket though possibly an American one. maybe Texans normally wear larger shirts anyway and European scientists often still wear lab coats even if not working with harsh chemicals so they can use the useful pocket. I still wouldn’t get much maths done with it as I’d end up trying to program it to put up cat pictures, and make silly noises (and/or send IR codes to confuse AV equipment if it has a IR diode too)