Message 196567 - Python tracker

[Mark Dickinson]
> Both those seem like clear error conditions to me, though I think it would be fine if the second condition produced a ZeroDivisionError rather than a ValueError.

Yeah, in hindsight it makes sense that both of those conditions should raise errors.  After all: "Explicit is better than implicit".

As far as optimization goes, could we potentially use functools.lru_cache to cache the cumulative distribution produced by the weights argument and optimize repeated sampling? 

Without @lru_cache:
>>> timeit.timeit("x = choice(list(range(100)), list(range(100)))", setup="from random import choice", number=100000)
36.7109281539997

With @lru_cache(max=128):
>>> timeit.timeit("x = choice(list(range(100)), list(range(100)))", setup="from random import choice", number=100000)
6.6788657720007905

Of course it's a contrived example, but you get the idea.

Walker's aliasing method looks intriguing.  I'll have to give it a closer look.  

I agree that an efficient implementation would be preferable but would feel out of place in random because of the return type.  I still believe a relatively inefficient addition to random.choice would be valuable, though.