On Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 4:55 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > Chris Angelico wrote: > > If you want unbiased, random (or at least pseudo-random) integers chosen > from an uniform distribution with proper error checking, you should use > randint or randrange. > > "I only need random-ish ints, but I need 'em yesterday!!!"
All I want is some data to sort, so that I can verify that my implementation is doing the same thing in every language that I write it in. Doesn't have to be casino-level purity of randomness. > You can't measure the speed of: > > [random.randint(0,sz*10-1) for i in range(sz)] > > and draw conclusions about randint alone. Sure, but by comparing the two lines of code (one with randint and one with random()), the other aspects can be cancelled out. > For what (little) it's worth, it seems that Python 3.2 should be a bit > faster than 2.6, at least if you consider the Pystone benchmark to mean > anything. > > http://www.levigross.com/post/2340736877/pystone-benchmark-on-2-6-2-7-3-2 That's what I would normally expect, that the new version outperforms the old - regardless of the program and the context. Exceptions need justification (as in the case of int/long vs just int - Py2 often outperforms Py3 when all the numbers fit inside machine int). > You do know that Python's heap implementation is written in C? Don't be > fooled by the heapq module being in Python. I didn't know, but it doesn't surprise me. But my purpose wasn't to sort the integers, it was to play with a particular hand-rolled implementation of a heap sort in multiple languages and make sure it was producing consistent results. ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
