Re: Division by zero

Christopher Heckman wrote:
0^0 is defined to be 1, at least everywhere I've seen it. This is
mainly so that polynomial and power series manipulations give the
answers that you would expect them to.

In article <1167227742.908747.259040@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<Nicolas.Capens@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Indeed, defining x^0 = 1 for any x makes most sense. The pow() function
from standard C even returns 1 when x is NaN. This definition can also
be used with Q, so 0^0 is equal to Q^0. Quite elegant.

In a strongly typed language, it might make sense to define 0^0 = 1 but
0^(0.0) = NaN (or at least (0.0)^(0.0) = NaN). For floating-point numbers
a and b, it usually makes most sense to think of a^b = exp(b log a), which
is difficult to make sense of when a = b = 0.0.

But this may be somewhat off-topic from the original post.
--
Tim Chow tchow-at-alum-dot-mit-dot-edu
The range of our projectiles---even ... the artillery---however great, will
never exceed four of those miles of which as many thousand separate us from
the center of the earth. ---Galileo, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
.