.NET, Rounding, and the sometimes ludicrous

I ran into the oddest (no pun intended) behaviour while programming in C#. I was rounding a double value and found that it would not give me a sensible answer. When I tried rounding a value of 3.5, I got the expected answer of 4, but when rounding 4.5, I was getting a nonsensical result:

ConsoleWrite("{0} => {1}", 3.5, Math.Round(3.5));
ConsoleWrite("{0} => {1}", 4.5, Math.Round(4.5));
3.5 => 4
4.5 => 4

Yeah, rounding 4.5 gives you  4 – as in “four”… – as in not 5 – as in WTF!

It turns out that this is a “valid” rounding method: to round midpoint values to the nearest even value. Apparently, this is done to even out a bias in traditional rounding (with traditional rounding, there are more values that will round upwards than there are values that will round down). Okay, I’ll buy that – for some obscure branches of mathematics it might make sense to use this unbiased scheme.

But why, why, why on this, or any other sane planet in the universe, would Microsoft select this (almost) useless algorithm as the DEFAULT method of rounding when everyone (obscure mathematicians aside) expects values to round up at .5?!?!

Anyway – if you want proper rounding, make sure you call Math.Round as follows:

ConsoleWrite("{0} => {1}", 3.5, Math.Round(3.5, 0, MidpointRounding.AwayFromZero));
ConsoleWrite("{0} => {1}", 4.5, Math.Round(4.5, 0, MidpointRounding.AwayFromZero));
3.5 => 4
4.5 => 5