[Python-Dev] Return type of round, floor, and ceil in 2.6

[Guido van Rossum]

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/)