Handling division by zero

[Stephen Boulet]

I have some math operations going on where sometimes the divisor will be
zero.

Is this an acceptable way to handle this: 
  1. test if the divisor is zero
  2. if so, instead of dividing by it, multiply by a large number
?

How do I figure out what a large number on my python 2.1 for NT
distribution is? Right now, I'm using:

MAXPOS = 0x7fffffff
MAXNEG = 0x80000000

I've imported scipy (which includes Numeric), and the numbers are
complex, if that matters, although:

>>> from scipy import *
>>> 0 == 0j
1

Thanks.

-- Stephen