Dick Moores wrote: > Why is random.choice so much slower than random.random()? In fact, by > a factor of 12! And randint(). Some 25 times slower than random(). Why? > (I know that random() is the basis for most of the other functions in > the random module, and a look at random.py, though I don't complete > understand it, gives me an idea what's going on with randint(), etc., > still...) > I haven't looked at the random code, but what I expect is happening is that for random.choice(a) you need to 1) get a random number 2) convert that random number into an index into your list. eg. [0,1] any random number < .5 would be index 0. recall that random goes from 0 to 1. 3) grab that item from the list and return it.
I'm guessing that step 2 and step 3 are why it takes a while, since these are probably implemented in Python. for random.randint(a,b): It might do random.choice(range(a,b+1)) so there's the overhead of generating the range. Course this is completely speculation and may be not true at all, but I thought I'd give it a shot :) _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
