REPOST: Re: Python 1.5.x vs Python 2.x.x

[John W. Baxter]

In article <a0kq1q$lb9ru$1 at ID-11957.news.dfncis.de>, Emile van Sebille
<emile at fenx.com> wrote:

> "James T. Dennis" <jadestar at idiom.com> wrote in message
> news:a0kor6$2o7u$2 at news.idiom.com...
> > Paul Rubin <phr-n2001d at nightsong.com> wrote:
> > > "Fredrik Lundh" <fredrik at pythonware.com> writes:
> > >>> Not bugs per se unless perfect backward compatibility was
> > >>> an overriding concern.
> >
> > >> it isn't.
> >
> > > It's a bug if something is gratuitously, unnecessarily incompatible,
> > > like "rand" disappearing.  What was the reason for that?
> >
> >  While that topic has come up: I find whrandom to be an unsightly
> >  name for accessing a set of functions which is so commonly accessed
> >  by novice students.  What was wrong with must calling it rand or
> >  random?  Is it pure pedantry?
> 
> whrandom now exists for backwards compatibility purposes and is scheduled
> for deprecation (is this a word? ;-)

See the Python Library Reference, 5.6 random and 5.7 whrandom.

>From the description of the whrandom module:

"This module implements a Wichmann-Hill pseudo-random number
generator..."

I'm sure (without checking) that Google can find you exhausting (er,
exhaustive) details about what that means.

So the wh in the name stands for Wichmann-Hill.  IIRC, in early days,
the module was offered as an improvement over the existing random
number module.  Now, the random module does Wichmann-Hill, and the old
whrandom name can be retired to the dustbin of history (nice phrase,
glad I invented it ;-)).

Something named rand would likely be based on the C library rand()
function...others can tell you why that's not very interesting these
days.

   --John

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From: "John W. Baxter" <jwbaxter at spamcop.net>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.python
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