On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 08:37:59AM -0400, Neil Girdhar wrote:
Actually I didn't notice that. It seems weird to find erf in math, but erf for complex numbers in scipy.special. It's just about organization and user discovery. I realize that from the developer's point of view, erf for complex numbers is complicated, but why does the user care?
99% of users don't care about math.errf at all. Of those who do, 99% don't care about cmath.errf. I'd like to see cmath.errf because I'm a maths junkie, but if I were responsible for *actually doing the work* I'd make the same decision to leave cmath.errf out and leave it for a larger, more complete library like scipy. There are an infinitely large number of potential programs which could in principle be added to Python's std lib, and only a finite number of person-hours to do the work. And there are costs to adding software to the std lib, not just benefits. -- Steven