[Python-Dev] Return type of round, floor, and ceil in 2.6 (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Fri Jan 4 20:08:43 CET 2008

On Jan 4, 2008 9:25 AM, <skip at pobox.com> wrote:

Guido> Rounding 0.5 to 0 is a new fad, called round-to-even, or Guido> statistician's rounding. Read Guido> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rounding . It's a standard, and Guido> more correct when doing statistical calculations. That's why Guido> we've chosen it for Python 3.0. But it should not bleed into Guido> Python 2.6. Thanks for the pointer. Given that it's been an ASTM standard since 1940 and apparently in fairly common use since the early 1900s, I wonder why it's not been more widely used in the past in programming languages.

Because programming language designers rarely are statisticians?

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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