Divine By Zero

Those PHP "features" are the real WTF.

http://rosettacode.org is a wiki with concise algorithms/solutions/snippets in as many languages as you can think of. The algorithms listed range from mundane to clever to anywhere in between. If you haven't already been there it's definitely worth a look.

There is a book called Beautiful Code by O'Rielly http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510046

Thank you for your answers. To add something myself, the book Programming Pearls contains exactly this - short, elegant solutions, plus some extra food for thought and exercises.

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Pearls-2nd-Jon-Bentley/dp/...

I've had situations where I'm calculating a ratio or something for each member of a result set, and needed a "safe_divide" function. Mine was much less complex than this one, but returned 0 if the denominator was 0.

Regarding #3: Division by zero should be a recoverable error in many programming situations. That's part of the beauty of NaN as defined by the IEEE standard for floating point numbers. It's quite a handy thing to be able to just do the operation and sort out the NaNs afterward. Suppose, for example, that you want to calculate the pixel-wise percent change in intensity between two grayscale images A and B. In a language with good built-in support for matrix datatypes, such as MATLAB, the ability to handle division by zero gracefully can quite often simplify the code.

result = (A-B)./A*100;

Now I can just use the isfinite function to produce a matrix of logical values that tells me which pixel locations have valid values (simultaneously handling the case of numerical overflow). Granted, this doesn't do much to simplify the code above. We could have just checked beforehand to find the pixels of A that had zero values. However, if you have a complicated expression involving multiple divisions, logarithms, or other functions that are undefined for some portion of the real numbers, treating these situations as "recoverable" in some sense allows you to write cleaner, more readable code if your implementation language permits you to just do the operation and check for NaN values (+Inf and -Inf too) afterward.

Maybe they're hoping that someone can explain what this person was thinking?

I doubt it, but I guess it's at least possible that someone here works with the criminally insane.

Yeah, agreed. The whole premise of the function is insane but I'm pretty sure the story is a lie because I just can't see how anybody would write the code this way unless they were intentionally trying to obfuscate code for humour/annoyance.

I actually LOL'd at geordish's, though.

He's an idiot.

Can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. :)

Aside from the whole function being asinine the only way to know "why" would be to ask him. The answer would probably also qualify as asinine.

Daily WTF is all about cringe-worthy programming stories. If you find them funny, so be it... But they're almost all cringe-worthy.