On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 8:31 PM, Christopher Jordan-Squire <cjordan1@uw.edu> wrote:
On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 11:14 PM, Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 22:07, Christopher Jordan-Squire <cjordan1@uw.edu> wrote:
So in the mean time, are there any suggestions for what this R sample function should be called, since random.sample is apparently taken?
If you default to size=1 (which you probably should anyways), then np.random.choice() makes sense, in analogy to random.choice() from the standard library.
Alright. I can make that change tomorrow. I'd prefer np.sample in the long-run, for compatibility with R. (False friends are loathsome things.) How does one petition to get function names deprecated?
I was about to argue that "random.choice" was a better name anyway, but then I remembered that the standard library "random.sample" exists and does something similar. So instead I'd like to argue that making this compatible with Python is more important than making it compatible with R :-). Specifically, 'np.random.sample(array_like, k)', with no further arguments, should perform random sampling *without* replacement. Ideally it should also efficiently handle the case where array_like is an xrange object. Docs are here: http://docs.python.org/library/random.html -- Nathaniel