> > , why isn't the compiler simply inserting the check for them
> 
> This is a reasonable option -- much more reasonable than trying to
> intercept the SIGFPE signal and somehow turn it into an exception.
> I still have doubts that reporting division by zero via an exception
> is really useful, though.

I don't see the problem with translating SIGFPE into an exception.
The same technique is used for bounds checking.  On SPARC/Solaris
SIGILL becomes an array bounds error.  To handle SIGFPE similarly
requires about five lines of code per platform in asmrun/signals.c
plus about 20 lines of code in asmrun/fail.c to generate the
appropriate exception.

If the language defines a divide-by-zero exception then the runtime
should generate the exception.  I can think of only one reason not
to do so on a platform where division by zero results in a signal:
the core dump may be easier to debug than an uncaught exception.
(How about a stack trace on error for compiled code?)


    --John Carr (jfc@mit.edu)
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