I do realize mIRC is an IRC client. Pardon yourself for stating the obvious. mIRC use math. mIRC needs math. And mIRC's scripts don't only need math as a tool but even for it's own good. There are no reason why the math should not be correct. (I can deal with decimal errors and won't complain about such. Decimals to a real math guy is only a matter og chosen accuracy). With minus zero and zero as a result from dividing by zero there is a completely different story. Here mIRC breaks against the very foundation of math.
And let's check if it's true that dividing by zero gives zero is really what's intuitive...
1 / 1 = 1
2 / 2 = 1
X / X = 1
Banana / Banana = 1
...
0 / 0 =
You fill it in, mate.
I can't reply precisely to your examples where it looks like you want zero when dividing something by zero motivated it's is more meaningfull than NA or 1. This is because it doesn't clearly show this is the case. In fact, quite the oposite. If you want a relationship between actual nicks and total nicks ever, and both are zeros, it makes alot of sense to get 1. Just as it is with 3 nicks and 3 nicks total, it tells you that of all nicks that is here now equals total nicks ever been here. With other words: we are at 100% of total. Just the same as with downloading bytes. If zero of zero, you have downloaded 100% of a file. With zero divided by zero was zero it shouldn't be possible to transfer zero byted files. Since we know this in fact is possible, another principle must be used for DCC, but there was a time when mIRC's DCC was not able to transfer files without data.
So, if you're not able to come up with some examples that support your view, or give a richer explaination that show your example support your view, I cannot escape the conclusion: you must share my view on this. That is if you're a reasonable guy. That's not a given.
If we solve this problem perfectly we would do it by an exception handler, where the user himself can chose what should happend when dividing by zero. This handler could have the result of 1 as default. They who live in another world than I do, could change this to zero.
Why the denominator is more important than numerator in division, I save for another post, when someone walks into my trap with the most obvious, but invalid, objection. You have been warned.
Written but not read,
Kru MacLure
