On Thursday, October 11, 2012 2:29:37 PM UTC+8, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > On Wed, 10 Oct 2012 20:33:16 -0700, Satoru Logic wrote: > > > > > I came across a function named `wsample` in a `utils` package of my > > > workplace recently. > > > > > > The "w" in `wsample` stands for `weighted`, and it randomly selects an > > > element from a container according to relative weights of all the > > > elements. > > > > > > In most articles and codes I saw online, a function like this is often > > > named `weighted_random_choice`, which sounds *correct* to me. So when I > > > saw this `wsample` function, I considered it a improper name. Because > > > `wsample`makes me think of `random.sample`, which returns a list of > > > randomly generated elements, not a element. > > > > You can have a sample size of one. > > > > wsample sounds fine to me. weighted_random_choice is okay too. It depends > > whether you value brevity over explicitness. Explicit is good, but some > > names are just too long. > > > > If this were my code base, I would probably go for weighted_sample > > without mentioning "random" in the name, the reasoning being that samples > > are almost always random so explicitly saying so doesn't help much.
I think if a programmer has used the built-in `random` module before, he would expect a function with "sample" in its name to return a population sequence. If a function is to return scalar value instead of sequence, I would expect it to be named "choice". > > > > > > -- > > Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
