Re: wip: functions median and percentile

On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 12:12:12PM -0500, Kevin Grittner wrote:
> David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> wrote:
>
> > Median may be useful, but we pretty much can't just call it
> > "median." Instead, we need to call it something like "left_median"
> > or "arithmetic_median."
>
> I think it would be reasonable, and perhaps preferable, to use just
> "median" for the semantics described in most dictionaries -- for
> example, this:
>
> http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/median
>
> If you do a google search for "median" and poke around, you'll find
> many places where this is the only definition mentioned; the others
> seem to be rather infrequently used. Why not make the commone usage
> convenient?

The reason not to is the same reason that MEDIAN doesn't appear in the
SQL standard, namely that what's common in one field is wrong in
another.

Cheers,
David.
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
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