Random Should be Part of Iterable

Ideas
1 
my_list = ['name1', 'name2', ...]
random_name = my_list.random()

Getting Random Elements from a List or an iterable is a basic task and it should be a function of the List/Iterable class.

2

I havenā€™t gotten random items from a list in my professional career. I have only done that in university settings so it feels too ā€œspecial caseā€ to add it into the interface of all iterables.

1 Like
3

random.choice(my_list) will do what you want. I donā€™t see any obvious advantage to adding a method that does the same thing and only works on lists.

11 Likes
4

What Iterable class?

2 Likes
5

It would be hard to pick one random number generation method to be the one provided.
Its properties would depend on the type of application needed.

6

Getting an arbitrary item from a sequence is a basic operation, and it is done by indexing, which is special form of subscripting. The random module selection functions use indexing. The fact that an index is considered ā€˜randomā€™ is secondary and irrelevant to the basic function of a sequence.

Python tries to limit builtin classes to truly basic functions. Floats have arithmetic, but exp, sin, etc, etc, etc are left to the math and other modules.

2 Likes