[Python-Dev] PEP 450 adding statistics module

[Terry Reedy]

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