[Python-Dev] Fwd: summing a bunch of numbers (or "whatevers")

[Tim Peters]

[David Ascher]
> Scipy's stats package is more complete than many people expect.   I
> would argue strongly against putting a 'cheap stats' package in the
> core, since building one such packages takes a huge amount of work,
> doing it twice is silly.  At least the first version of the stats
> package now in chaco used to not require numeric, although I think that
> requirement is a red herring in practice.

I expect that when Guido is thinking about a simple stats package, he's not
picturing more than median, mean, sdev, variance, and maybe percentile
points, all limited to one dimension.  Just about anyone can take over
maintenance of those if need be, although how to code a numerically robust
sdev isn't well known outside of people who've been burned by "good enough,
it can't be *that* hard <wink>" initial attempts.