Curious behavior of random.shuffle in Sympy Live Shell

[plonter99]

Hi all,

I am new to Sympy.

Going through the tutorial, I tried to do the exercise at http://docs.sympy.org/latest/tutorial/simplification.html#example-continued-fractions

I noticed that the results were not what I expected, so after exploring a little bit, it seems that the following is happening:

>>> import random

>>> l = [1,2,3,4,5]

>>> random.shuffle(l)

>>> l

[5,3,2,4,1]

>>> l

[2,4,1,3,5]

>>> l

[5,3,2,1,4]

>>> l

[3,5,2,4,1]

>>> l

[2,3,4,1,5]

It looks as though l is getting continuously shuffled in-place...

So, my questions are:

1. What can explain this behavior?
2. Is this a particular issue with my environment? I am running chrome 49.0.2623.112 on Windows Vista, which is rather old... If it is a general issue then the example in the tutorial doesn't work, unless I missed something...

Thanks!

[Aaron Meurer]

That's an unfortunate side effect of the way SymPy Live is currently
implemented. It reevaluates expressions every time it executes. In a
real Python shell this would work as expected.

Aaron Meurer

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