Rounding numbers in Python #shorts #python #integers

Dividing integers is a common operation in programming, and you may want to round to the ceiling or to the floor integer if the result of the division is not an integer. Let's take a look at these two examples in Python.

Dividing five by two will result to two and a half. What do you think will be the result if we round? It is 2. How about dividing seven by two? Three and a half should round to 3? No, it rounds to 4!

Why is that? Starting v3, Python implemented Banker's rounding (also known as round to even rounding, statistician's rounding, Gaussian rounding) as its default rounding method. Legacy method of always rounding 0.5 up technique results in a bias toward a higher number. When we make millions of these calculations, the magnitude of this bias becomes significant. One caveat of this method is that increasing the probability of even numbers to odd numbers. Multiple modern programming languages such as C# and Ruby are using this method as their default rounding algorithm. This is applicable only to the decimal point ending in 5, for 4 to 0 it always rounds to the nearest floor integer and for 6 and 9, it always rounds to the nearest ceiling integer.

#python #shorts #integers