Re: (\ x 0) revisited, revisited, revisited

[JONL at PARC-MAXC]

In response to your message sent  19 December 1982 21:00-EST

It has always been the case that MacLisp's "single-character"
arithmetic functions were driven by the desire for open-compilation.
Thus one gives up any interpreter error checking in the compiled
code, merely accepting what the hardware returns.  It's certainly
no surprise, then, that the PDP10 does odd things with division by
zero -- or do I mistake the tone of your note?

By the bye, I had to bring in the generic operation, since the
"right" thing for the \ subr to do is to cause an error when
given a 0 divisor (just as it would if you gave it NIL for an arg);
unfortunately, this may not be the right thing to do to "fix" the
REMAINDER function: see the caveat in my previous msg.