Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why 'round' does not just round numbers ?

Felipe Lessa wrote:

On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 8:15 AM, Janis Voigtlaender wrote:

...

That is of course true (and was the topic of heated discussion with my fourth grade math teacher), but does not explain 2.5 -> 2.

If you round to odd instead of round to even, then 4.5 rounds to 5,

Well, of course I did not learn to round to odd. I learned to round .5 to above, but not to do repeated rounding. So we would never have either of

2.45 -> 2.4 -> 2 2.45 -> 2.5 -> 3

as you suggest. Instead, always in one go: 2.45 -> 2 Because of the 4, whereas any digit following it would be ignored: 2.4x -> x In fact, by your explanation, you would have: 3.46 -> 3.5 -> 4 Which is most odd. 3.46 is definitely closer to 3 than to 4. -- Dr. Janis Voigtlaender http://wwwtcs.inf.tu-dresden.de/~voigt/ mailto:voigt@tcs.inf.tu-dresden.de