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

[Ethan Furman]

On 08/03/2013 07:00 PM, Eli Bendersky wrote:
>
> While I'm somewhat -0.5 on the general idea of the statistics module
> (competing with well-established, super-optimized and
> by-themselves-famous numeric libraries Python has does not sound like
> a worthy goal),

Sure, competing with already established libraries is silly.  Fortunately, that's not what is happening here.  This PEP 
is about providing a minimal, common set of statistics functions for the average person.

>  I have to agree with Alexander w.r.t. "sum". Strongly
> -1 from me on having functions with the same name as existing stdlib
> functions but different functionality. This is very much unpythonic.

I thought the whole point of name spaces was to be able to have the same name mean different things in different 
contexts.  Surely no one expects to be able to use `webbrowser.open` or `gzip.open` anywhere `open` can be used.

--
~Ethan~