Of course it is, and there are collections of letters that are pronounceable words, but it doesn't give them meaning. The equivalent in English would be a spell checker that didn't flag "douberness" and passed it along. Sure you can pronounce if if you look at it phonetically but it doesn't mean anything. It is syntactically correct but broken. VHDL has a lot of things that can be written but not actually expressed in hardware.
Sure, I've no doubt it's more common there - that's very much my understanding. The wording of the above just struck me very much as if it were meant to be hypothetical, which I found amusing given that it's nothing like.
Whether it's detected at compile time or runtime, a statement that evaluates to DIVBYZERO can be handled. Taking the result as an ordinary value that blows up your program, on the other hand...
In this case, a 'run-time failure' would be completely unacceptable, as the 'run-time' environment is your $X000 hardware manufacturing run. Hardware development isn't in the same league as software. It's not even the same sport. Like comparing football to rugby. Both played on a gridiron, but entirely differently.
First, there exist software environments where errors cost significantly more than a hardware run. Obviously, those environments contain hardware as well, but "cost of a runtime error" is clearly not the only important thing here.
Second, my only point was that the example given was a piss poor example of the difference between hardware and software. Obviously a bad example doesn't disprove the claim it's supposed to support.
Everyone's piling on you because that wasn't the point of the example. Automation grants humans extraordinary powers, as long as humans aren't simply steps within the automatic system.
There's been an awkward growing phase of the technology industry that has led to technicians that don't have any real understanding of the systems they maintain. Compare and contrast Robert DeNiro's character in Brazil with the repairmen he has to clean up after. We could be training those poor duct maintenance guys better.
Yes, "every language" was glib. In any language we could avoid it, actually, by hiding division behind something that gave a Maybe or Option or similar. My point, though, was that his "Imagine..." was actually representative of virtually all of the languages that virtually all of us work in virtually all of the time. It is therefore a poor example of a way in which HW is different.
Sure, that would be a good reason to go there. I didn't mean to cast aspersions at dependent types. I was just confused/amused at the typical case being cast as a hypothetical.