Why does the Mac dashboard calculator show "Not a number" instead of "Overflow", or "Error", or even "Infinity"? It just seems like the worst message for it to display.
MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.1)
I kinda have that too except it was my desktop one. Screenshot:
By the way the question was 10^ (You can get that by doing shift 6)308.
Weird, but doing 10/0 also does that same thing. It should say Infinity or ∞ instead. (That looks like a flipped 8 but it is the infinity symbol)
Probably because dividing anything by zero is not a number. It's NOT infinity. It's NOT 'zero' but it is undefined. A good explanation as why you cannot divide by zero is provided by the University of Nottingham's Mathematics department. Many calculators just give up and say "error" or "Overflow" or whatever when they try to iterate the division. Apple kinda looks like they taken the input of a mathematician for the errors of their calculator app. Saying "Not a number" for any division-by-zero is actually more accurate than saying "error" or "Overflow"
Why does the Mac dashboard calculator show "Not a number"?
