Comment by roadbuster
12 hours ago
The only way to achieve this is to either put a runtime software check on a variable whenever it's assigned/used, or to literally add hardware support in processors themselves which literally throws an interrupt when a "neverShallBeZero" variable is assigned to zero.
There's no viable way to statically prove at compile-time that these variables will never become zero at runtime, ultimately forcing a system of endless runtime checks (be it software or hardware)... which is why processors already throw exception interrupts when division by zero is attempted.
It's possible, just extremely difficult.
You're kind of saying the only way to do it is in software or hardware :)
An alternative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projectively_extended_real_lin...
The projectively extended real line defines division by zero, no reason you couldn't have a floating point type that implemented it.
>There's no viable way to statically prove at compile-time that these variables will never become zero at runtime
strongly typed programming languages like Ada allow for types which have ranges such as disallowing zero -- but also any arbitrary thing like you can create a floating point "degrees" type which is [0.0, 360.0] or any other ranged type