[Haskell-cafe] Proper rounding of floating-point values

[Troels Henriksen]

Much to my surprise, there does not seem to be a function in base (let
alone the Prelude) that rounds floating point numbers correctly in the
presence of NaNs and infinities.  For example:

  > round (0/0 :: Double) :: Int
  0
  > round (0/0 :: Double) :: Integer
-269653970229347386159395778618353710042696546841345985910145121736599013708251444699062715983611304031680170819807090036488184653221624933739271145959211186566651840137298227914453329401869141179179624428127508653257226023513694322210869665811240855745025766026879447359920868907719574457253034494436336205824
  > round (1/0 :: Double) :: Int
  0
  > round (1/0 :: Double) :: Integer
  179769313486231590772930519078902473361797697894230657273430081157732675805500963132708477322407536021120113879871393357658789768814416622492847430639474124377767893424865485276302219601246094119453082952085005768838150682342462881473913110540827237163350510684586298239947245938479716304835356329624224137216

This is because the 'round' function must return an instance of
Integral, which Double is not.  In the presence of NaNs and infinities,
this does not fly.  In my own code, I ended up just using the FFI to
call out to C, which is simple enough:

  foreign import ccall "round" c_round :: Double -> Double
  foreign import ccall "roundf" c_roundf :: Float -> Float

However, it does disturb me a bit that I cannot find a standard way to
do this fairly common operation.

(GHC's implementation does seem to avoid many other common pitfalls[0],
probably because it does use C's round() under the covers.)

[0]: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/rounding-implementations-in-go/

-- 
\  Troels
/\ Henriksen