•Re: counter-intuitive sprintf behaviour

Besides all the answers in this thread so far of "binary representation of decimal fractions is inexact", I saw a few puzzles that were cleanly answered by another often-forgotten fact:

Rounding of a value that is exactly halfway between two whole numbers will always go to the nearest even number.

This is mandated by mathematicians in an attempt to reduce round-off error.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
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Comment on •Re: counter-intuitive sprintf behaviour

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Re: •Re: counter-intuitive sprintf behaviour by Anonymous Monk on Jan 15, 2003 at 05:45 UTC
Rounding of a value that is exactly halfway between two whole numbers will always go to the nearest even number. Only when the radix/2 is odd (e.g. base 2 or base 10) When the radix is a multiple of 4, rounding to the nearest odd number is preferred.	[reply]