Is 1/0 a legal Java expression?

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Is 1/0 actually a legal Java expression that should compile anytime anywhere?

Yes.

What does JLS say about it?

Nothing specific … apart from saying that division by zero will result in a runtime exception. However, the JLS acknowledges that possibility of runtime exceptions in the following definition:

“A compile-time constant expression is an expression denoting a value of primitive type or a String that does not complete abruptly and is composed using only the following: …”

(Emphasis added.) So the following would NOT compile:

switch(i) {
    case 1:
    case 1 + 1: 
    case 1 / 0:  // compilation error.
}

If this is legal, is there a good reason for it?

Good question. I suppose that it is a way to throw ArithmeticException though that is hardly a plausible reason. A more likely reason for specifying Java this way is to avoid unnecessary complexity in the JLS and compilers to deal with an edge case that is rarely going to bite people.

But this is all by the by. The fact is that 1/0 is valid Java code, and no Java compiler should ever flag this as a compilation error. (It would be reasonable for a Java compiler to issue a warning, provided that there was a compiler switch to turn it off.)

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