random.gauss vs. random.normalvariate

[Carl Banks]

On Aug 15, 12:49 pm, Alan G Isaac <alan.is... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Quotinghttp://docs.python.org/3.1/library/random.html#random.gauss:
>     Gaussian distribution. mu is the mean, and sigma is the
>     standard deviation. This is slightly faster than the
>     normalvariate() function defined below.
>
> So since both are offered and gauss is faster, I assume it
> must have some offsetting disadvantage.  What is it?

random.gauss is not thread safe.

I'm kind of surprised the html docs don't mention this; the docstring
does.


Carl Banks