random.gauss vs. random.normalvariate

Alan G Isaac alan.isaac at gmail.com
Sat Aug 15 16:54:37 EDT 2009


> 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?



On 8/15/2009 4:26 PM Carl Banks apparently wrote:
> random.gauss is not thread safe.
> 
> I'm kind of surprised the html docs don't mention this; the docstring
> does.



Thank you,
Alan Isaac



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