[issue20481] Clarify type coercion rules in statistics module

[Nick Coghlan]

Nick Coghlan added the comment:

I think it's also acceptable at this point for the module docs to just say that handling of mixed type input is undefined and implementation dependent, and recommend doing "map(int, input_data)", "map(float, input_data)", "map(Decimal, input_data)" or "map(Fraction, input_data)" to ensure getting a consistent answer for mixed type input.

I believe it would also be acceptable for the module to just fail immediately as soon as it detects an input type that differs from the type of the first value rather than attempting to guess the most appropriate behaviour.

This close to 3.4rc1 (Sunday 9th February), I don't think we want to be committing to *any* particular implementation of type coercion.

----------

_______________________________________
Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue20481>
_______________________________________