I'm also sorry if you felt like you were being criticized in any way for proposing alternate behaviors. Please keep in mind that any disagreement is just that – disagreement. Even if everyone seems disagree with you, please do make your case. As you've noted, they may change their minds – or they might not. We can't come to decisions unless everyone tries to make the case for what they believe is the best behavior in a civil, reasoned fashion. To me, the fact that these behavior both changed, despite initially being unpopular, indicates just how important this kind of discussion is.
Regarding this particular change, I'm personally not really in favor of the default being the IEEE ties-to-even behavior – I don't think the numerical argument in its favor is really compelling and I think the current C-like round-ties-from-zero behavior is less surprising and should continue to be the default. But I'm not the one doing the work on this and I'm not the most informed person to make such a decision. So let's try the IEEE behavior and see how it goes. If this turns out to be problematic or annoying (I kind of suspect it will), we can still change our minds before Julia 1.0, so now is the time to give it a shot. On Fri, Dec 26, 2014 at 3:08 PM, Simon Byrne <[email protected]> wrote: > On Friday, 26 December 2014 06:14:34 UTC-6, Hans W Borchers wrote: >> >> I started this thread long time ago with a question about rounding rules >> and the IEEE floating point standard. I felt like being criticized for even >> thinking Julia could follow the "round-to-even" rule. Now I learn that >> Julia version 0.4 will apply this rule (as default?). >> > > I apologise if you felt I was being critical, that was not at all my > intention. These are complicated issues, and I don't claim to have all the > solutions. In fact, we still have yet to resolve the problem with the > digits argument: I have just opened an issue explaining the problem here: > > https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/9464 > > Contributions to the discussion are certainly welcome. > > -simon >
