Division by zero is handled the same on x86, and also changed from "trap" to "fault" after the original 8086/8088. And despite what is often said about its variable-length instruction format, skipping over opcodes is pretty much trivial compared to VAX.

Early versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator included a handler for the divide exception, which adjusted the result to +/- "infinity" (for a 16-bit signed integer, 32767 or -32768). The rest of the code relied on this in order to work correctly, and it was more efficient to take advantage of the processor's microcode doing this check rather than coding it explicitly before every division.

So even if it doesn't make mathematical sense, being able to continue after this type of exception is a useful feature to have.

>(and if you ignore SIGSEGV, it is considered perfectly acceptable that your program spins in a SIGSEGV loop until you kill it.)

This, on the other hand, shouldn't ever be acceptable. If a fatal-by-default signal is just ignored, it should always terminate the process.