I agree that the name is not the most descriptive one, and perhaps we should have the more descriptive ones. But when I hear "round", I assume it's the kind of rounding Haskell does. And I assumed this before Haskell came about.
On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 6:07 PM, Bart Massey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Lennart Augustsson <lennart <at> augustsson.net> writes: >> On Mon, Oct 27 2008, Bart Massey <bart <at> cs.pdx.edu> wrote: >> > I think given that the Haskell 98 Report is pretty >> > explicit about the behavior of round, we're stuck with >> > it, but I don't like it. It's yet another tiny >> > impediment to Haskell newbies, as demonstrated by the >> > original post. >> >> You're assuming newbies from a bad educational system that >> hasn't taught them how to round properly. :) > > Naw. :-) > > I'm just saying that the name "round" is unfortunate, since > there's no single universally accepted mathematical > definition for it. For this reason many programming > languages either don't provide it or provide a different > version. The names "roundHalfUp" and "roundHalfEven" are > much better: they each correspond to a well-known > mathematical function that is codified in an IEEE standards > document. > > If it were up to me, I'd deprecate round in Haskell' and > make the documentation point to these other rounding > functions. > > Our solution in Nickle (http://nickle.org), BTW, was to > provide floating point with user-settable mantissa precision > and a default precision of 256 bits. For all practical > purposes we know of, this makes worrying about the edge > cases for rounding pointless. Kahan has a nice paper on > this that I can't find right now. > > Of course, this solution also makes FP computation > creepingly slow, and exposes users to occasional bugs in our > FP math library... :-) > > Bart Massey > bart <at> cs.pdx.edu > > > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe > _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe