On 8/14/2013 9:25 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
Hi all,
I have raised a tracker item and PEP for adding a statistics module to the standard library:
http://bugs.python.org/issue18606
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0450/
There has been considerable discussion on python-ideas,
I have avoided this discussion, in spite of a decade+ experience as a statistician-programmer, because I am quite busy with Idle testing and there seem to be enough other knowledgeable people around. But I approve of the general idea. I once naively used the shortcut computing formula for variance, present in all too many statistics books, in a program I supplied to a couple of laboratories. After a few months, maybe even a year, of daily use, it crashed trying to take the square root of a negative variance*. Whoops. Fortunately, I was still around to quickly fix it. *As I remember, the three value were something like 10000, 10000, 10001 as single-precision floats. -- Terry Jan Reedy