On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 10:55 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com> wrote:
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
I mentioned this at the end of my initial response to Josef. I agree that my use of sample is more consistent with the python random library's usage, except that I don't want to have the same name but a different default. I think that also counts as a 'false friend'. So I think np.random.choice is a better name for right now. Simpler to have the same function with the same defaults but a different name than the same function with the same name and different defaults. -Chris
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