🔬37. Dividing by zero in Raku

You might already know that it is possible to divide by zero in Perl 6 🙂

Well, seriously speaking, you can only do that until you don’t want to announce it to the others. So, the division itself is not a problem:

$ ./perl6 -e'my $x = 1; my $y = $x / 0; say "Done"'
Done

It becomes a problem when the result of the division is used somewhere, for example, when you print it:

$ ./perl6 -e'my $x = 1; my $y = $x / 0; say $y'
Attempt to divide 1 by zero using div
  in block  at -e line 1

This type of failure is called soft failure. Today, we will look at the places in Rakudo, where a divide-by-zero error can be triggered.

Did you notice that the error message above says divide by zero using div. Does it mean that other methods of division by zero exist too? Let’s figure it out.

The error message is generated within an exception (src/core/Exception.pm) of the X::Numeric::DivideByZero type:

my class X::Numeric::DivideByZero is Exception {
    has $.using;
    has $.details;
    has $.numerator;
    method message() {
        "Attempt to divide{$.numerator ?? " $.numerator" !! ''} by zero"
          ~ ( $.using ?? " using $.using" !! '' )
          ~ ( " $_" with $.details );
    }
}

As you see, the final message may vary.

The most obvious case when the exception can happen is division. For example, integer division (src/core/Int.pm):

multi sub infix:<div>(Int:D \a, Int:D \b) {
    b
      ?? nqp::div_I(nqp::decont(a), nqp::decont(b), Int)
      !! Failure.new(X::Numeric::DivideByZero.new(
            :using<div>, :numerator(a))
         )
}

You see, the :using attribute is set to div, which indicates that the error happened inside the div routine.

Just out of curiosity, what if you skip the check if b is zero and pass the operands to NQP?

multi sub infix:<div>(Int:D \a, Int:D \b) {
    nqp::div_I(nqp::decont(a), nqp::decont(b), Int)

#    b
#      ?? nqp::div_I(nqp::decont(a), nqp::decont(b), Int)
#      !! Failure.new(X::Numeric::DivideByZero.new(
#            :using<div>, :numerator(a))
#         )
}

You’ll get a lower-level exception:

$ ./perl6 -e'my $x = 1; my $y = $x / 0; say $y'
Floating point exception: 8

OK, going back to original sources. Another example is the modulo operator, where the error message is a bit different:

$ ./perl6 -e'my $x = 1; my $y = $x % 0; say $y'
Attempt to divide 1 by zero using %
  in block <unit> at -e line 1

This time, the division was using %, which is easily seen in the code:

multi sub infix:<%>(Int:D \a, Int:D \b --> Int:D) {
    . . .
    Failure.new(
        X::Numeric::DivideByZero.new(:using<%>, :numerator(a))
    )
    . . .

There are a few other places in the code that generate the X::Numeric::DivideByZero exception; those (for example, the divisibility operator %%) are similar to what we already covered.

Addendum

What should worry you is why did the error message mention div if we were dividing numbers using /. Maybe it was a different place, and the error message was generated not inside infix::<div>? No, that’s correct (it is easy to prove by changing the error message in the source code).

Use of the / character does not necessarily mean a division. A Rat number can be created; for example:

$ ./perl6 -e'my $x = 1/0; say $x.WHAT'
(Rat)

The real call tree for our example is the following:

• Rat::infix:</>(Int, Int)
  • DIVIDE_NUMBERS(Int, Int)
    • Int::infix<div>(Int, Int)

So, it starts with an attempt to create a Rat value and goes deeper to the div infix. The DIVIDE_NUMBERS function is a part of the Rat constructor, which we already mentioned yesterday, so it is another stimulus to look at it in detail.