Dividing by zero in Papyrus seems to always return the value 1. I currently have a script where some trigonometry is used, and sometimes one of the variables is zero which messes up the results. I do not want the result to be 1 in that case, but rather just have no effect at all, i.e. 36 / 0 returns 36.

What I'm curious about is if there is any other way to handle this except for checking if variables are 0 before calculation takes place and if a var is 0 doing a different set of calculations.

Is this a common problem in programming and how is it usually handled?

It's probably a fail-safe to prevent the script from crashing. Division by zero is an illegal arithmetical function.

Other languages often have exception handling mechanisms which can trap divisions by zero, but still, I think, the normal way of handling the issue is to check the variable for zero first.

And an illegal function of the universe.

If Beth hadn't put this in the code, we wouldn't be here right now.

/bad jokes

*leaves thread*

I'd prefer to get log messages about attempts to divide by zero rather than having it return 1 with no notice.

This is WAAAAAAAAAYYYYY better than in Oblivion:


If actor.isincombat > 0 && actor.isincombat < 0
If 1 == 3
x = 1/0
endif
endif


EVEN THAT would STILL CTD in Oblivion! I had to go thru hundreds of my scripts from 6 years of mods to check /0 errors once I discovered that in Oblivion.

If x > 0
z = y/x
endif

I had to change to:

z = y/(x+0.001)

To stop the CTD in Oblivion. Not a great way to deal with it but there was no way I was going to rework hundreds of my scripts at that point.

You'll get a "Cannot divide by zero" error in the log with full stack trace and the division will be ignored. The "1" in the above case may be whatever is left over in the temp variable the compiler made after the divide opcode was skipped. In short, divide by 0 is undefined and will spit out an appropriate error.

Ah, good to know, thanks.