Jason, I agree. Although I didn't exactly make it explicit enough, that was my basic reasoning.
On Tue, Oct 6, 2015, 14:03 Jason Orendorff <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Oct 2, 2015 at 6:37 PM, Alexander Jones <[email protected]> wrote: > > What do other languages do? > > Well, Python's standard library has both a `sum()` builtin and a > statistics module. They handle floating-point weirdness differently: > > >>> sum([1.0, 1e18, -1e18]) > 0.0 > >>> import statistics > >>> statistics.mean([1.0, 1e18, -1e18]) > 0.3333333333333333 > > See <https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0450/> for statistics module > rationale. I didn't find a PEP for sum(). > > ...But for JS, the question is: why should we think TC39 and JS > engines will be as good at satisfying this need as third-party > libraries? > > I hope that users who require numerical accuracy can just crack open a > book. They should have, in JS, all the floating-point-munging tools > they need to implement a book algorithm. If they don't, let's focus on > providing those! > > *Maybe* JS engine implementors can provide as-good accuracy with > better speed. But not necessarily. A standard Math.sum() may even be > slower, because TC39 is likely to specify nice, consistent, but > inconvenient behavior, such as supporting the iterator protocol or > specially handling array holes or infinities or NaN or -0. Library > authors don't have to care about this stuff. TC39 absolutely has to > care---about the risks of underspecification, at least---even at the > expense of speed. > > -j > _______________________________________________ > es-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss >
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