-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 03/29/2010 09:09 PM, Scott McMurray wrote:
Close, but not quite: the inverse of zero is zero.
Uh, what? I thought that the point of an inverse is that multiplication gives 1 -- that's certainly what I read at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_multiplicative_inverse
<sigh> If you guys are going to make me eat crow so often, could I at least have some ketchup?
Wouldn't the modulo inverse of 0 be a NaN just like the result of 1/0?
Yes, it would. In my defense, I *did* have a reason to think that it was valid -- if you list the inverses of all the numbers by a particular prime, you're supposed to get every number back again, each a single time, in a different order. The only way that's true is if zero were its own inverse. That being the case, zero *would* be a valid response for those two functions. If I'm convinced that the Not-a-Number value shouldn't be included in the library, that's probably how I'll do it. - -- Chad Nelson Oak Circle Software, Inc. * * * -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkuxVC0ACgkQp9x9jeZ9/wQmkQCgxtjMY3e9AlkoWaH5kEsKEE/d JjAAoKXwgfeuQHXXBNpa9QiuAkWan1sc =0Fg/ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----