This is an interesting point and roundToIntegralTiesToAway() does have an appealing symmetry, but I think it is a broader issue than the constrained case I originally posted.
Whichever of the approaches obtains, it seems that if the floating point argument A represents a real number which is also in the space of integers (Z), then one would expect round(A) to equal A. I think this is what most programmers would expect. For what it's worth, this is what appears to be implemented in the C language (GCC 4.2.1). Brian On Aug 23, 2013, at 1:44 PM, Dmitry Nadezhin wrote: > I guess that the method java.lang.Math.round() should correspond to > roundToIntegralTiesToAway of the IEEE 754-2008. Standard says about it > (section 5.9): > === > roundToIntegralTiesToAway(x) rounds x to the nearest integral value, with > halfway cases > rounding away from zero > === > > So the halfway cases are n + 0.5 ( like -1.5, -0.5, +0.5, +1.5). > Standard says that roundToIntegralTiesToAway rounds them to (-2,-1,+1,+2).
