[issue19933] Round default argument for "ndigits"

[Mark Dickinson]

Mark Dickinson added the comment:

> Anyway, why not round(1.2) -> 1.0 in the first place? Just curious.

All this changed as part of PEP 3141.  I wasn't watching Python 3 development closely back then, but I *think* at least part of the motivation was to provide a way to get away from the use of `int` to truncate a float to its integer part:  the argument goes that a simple type conversion shouldn't throw away information, and that if you want a transformation from float to int that throws away information you should ask for it explicitly.  So `math.trunc` was born as the preferred way to truncate a float to an int, and `math.floor`, `math.ceil` and `round` became alternative float -> int conversion methods.  That entailed those functions returning ints.

<off-topic> In the case of `math.floor` and `math.ceil` at least, I think this is regrettable.  There are plenty of places where you just want a float -> float floor or ceiling, and Python no longer has a cheap operation for that available:  floor as a float-to-float operation is cheap;  floor as a float-to-long-integer operation is significantly more costly.

In the case of `round`, we still have `round(x, 0)` available as a cheap float->float conversion, so it's less of a problem.  And I hardly ever use `trunc`, so I don't care about that case. </off-topic>

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue19933>
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