[issue33494] random.choices ought to check that cumulative weights are in ascending order
Raymond Hettinger
report at bugs.python.org
Tue May 15 06:58:18 EDT 2018
Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettinger at gmail.com> added the comment:
I concur with Serhiy. The proposed check would cripple the intended use of cumulative weights which is provided as a way to avoid the cost of rebuilding the weights on every call. FWIW, bisect() has a long history of requiring sorted inputs and has a similar possibility of misuse, but it too would cripple its core use case if it were to have to validate that the user input was sorted.
I'm open to a docs change but am dubious that that would have helped the OP on python-ideas. The docs already have a specific example showing the relationship between weights and cum_weights, as well as indicating that the purpose of cum_weights is to save the work of computing the weights accumulation. There is an additional example in the recipes section.
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assignee: -> rhettinger
components: +Documentation -Library (Lib)
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<https://bugs.python.org/issue33494>
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