Question

I was told by a professor that dividing by zero or taking a negative square root in Python crashes if you do it in Windows 98.

This seems ridiculous since Python is an interpreted language, but I don’t have a way to verify this, and Windows is notorious… Can anyone confirm or deny the claim? If so, does it have to do with the fact that Python is written in C? (And would C really crash the whole OS for division by zero!?)

Answer 1

It should result in a ZeroDivisionError exception. I can’t imagine why this would be different in Windows 98.

>>> 1/0
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ZeroDivisionError: integer division or modulo by zero

What a remarkable waste of time.

Under Win98 with Python 2.3.5

Python 2.3.5 (#62, Feb  8 2005, 16:23:02) [MSC v.1200 32 bit (Intel)] on win32
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    makes to its subprocess using this computer's internal loopback
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IDLE 1.0.5      
>>> import sys
>>> sys.getwindowsversion()
(4, 10, 67766446, 1, ' A ')
>>> sys.version_info
(2, 3, 5, 'final', 0)
>>> 1/0

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#3>", line 1, in -toplevel-
    1/0
ZeroDivisionError: integer division or modulo by zero
>>>