By design, why does the C# compiler allows any float or double values to be divided by zero?

Question

By design, why does the C# compiler allows any float or double values to be divided by zero?

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        double x = 0.0 / 0;

        float y = 1f / 0;


    }
}

Answer 1

Because IEEE 754 floating-point values have special non-numeric values to deal with this:

PS Home:\> 1.0/0
Infinity
PS Home:\> 0.0/0
NaN

whereas dividing an integer by zero is always an exception (in the C# sense¹), so you could just throw the exception directly.

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¹ Dividing a floating-point number by zero is also an exception but at a completely different level and many programming languages abstract this away.

Answer 2

Because floating point values have a valid (and genuinely useful) representation of infinity, whereas integers of any type do not.