Trying to use sets for random selection, but the pop() method returns items in order

[Carl Banks]

On Jul 1, 7:02 pm, Paul Rubin <http://phr...@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote:
> Carl Banks <pavlovevide... at gmail.com> writes:
> > random.shuffle() is still better when you're iterating through the
> > whole list as the OP was doing.
> The OP wrote:
>
>     I want to select, 70% random records from a List. I thougth set
>     where a good idea so I tested this way: ...

I was going by his example which went through all the items in the
list.


> That sounds like 70% of the list, not the whole list.  Note that
> in addition to using time proportional to the size of the entire
> lsit rather than the size of the sample, shuffle() also messes up
> the order of the list.  
>
> Why would shuffle ever be better?

Because we were talking about different things.


Carl Banks