[Python-ideas] About adding a newiteratormethodcalled "shuffled"

[Andrew McNabb]

On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 11:36:28AM -0700, Raymond Hettinger wrote:
>
>> It's only broken in a theoretical sense.  It's fun to think about, but I
>> wouldn't lose any sleep over it.
>
> It's not even broken in a theoretical sense.  It does exactly what it says it does.
>
> Besides, this whole conversation is somewhat senseless.  You can't get any
> more randomness out of a generator than you put into the seed in the
> first place.  If you're not putting thousands of digits in your seed, then
> no PRNG is going to give you an equal chance of producing every possible
> shuffle for a large list.

I agree with you--I just didn't want to make too strong of a statement.
I certainly believe that any comment in the docs about this issue would
be distracting and unhelpful.

-- 
Andrew McNabb
http://www.mcnabbs.org/andrew/
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