[Python-ideas] Pre-PEP: adding a statistics module to Python

[Steven D'Aprano]

On 04/08/13 05:47, Alexander Belopolsky wrote:

> The PEP does not mention statistics.sum(), but the reference implementation
> includes it.  I am not sure stdlib needs the third sum function after
> builtins.sum and math.fsum.  I think it will be better to improve
> builtins.sum instead.


I don't know enough C to volunteer to do that. If the built-in sum() is improved to the point it passes my unit tests, I would consider using it in the future. However, it is traditional to expose a sum() function under Stats in scientific calculators, and I think that whether I use my own, or the built-in, the statistics module should continue to expose it as a public function.

For the same reason, I'm very slightly +0.01 leaning towards adding a sum2 function for calculating the sum of squares, but on the other hand it is simple enough to do with a generator expression:

sum(x**2 for x in data)

so I thought I'd leave it out and see if there is demand for it.


-- 
Steven