Responding to suggestions on the tracker and some off-line suggestions.
Davin suggested that english named accessors instead of greek letters would result in more intelligible user code. Steven suggested that the parameters still need to be *mu* and *theta* which are used elsewhere (and I noted those parameter names are used in linked-to resources).
Michael suggested proving-out the API by seeing whether it generalized to *Lognormal*. I did so and found that Lognormal distribution parameters *mu* and *sigma* do not represent the mean and standard deviation of the lognormal distribution (instead, they are for the underlying regular normal distribution).
Putting these ideas together, we have NormalDist parameterized by *mu* and *sigma* but offering English named properties for accessors. That gives lets us match other API that access mu and sigma, it matches the external resources on the topic, gives us clear english names in user code. The API extends nicely to LogNormal where the parameters and the summary statistic accessors are not the same.
https://bugs.python.org/issue36018
Although nth roots of negative numbers are real for odd n, the
statistics module doesn't make use of this. Remove support for
negative roots from the private _nth_root function, which
simplifies the test suite.
Passing Counter objects to the Counter constructor is
special cased, going through iter() firsts ensures they
are handled the same way as any other iterable.
(Committing on Steven's behalf as I don't believe his
SSH key is registered yet)
Raymond Hettinger
Serhiy Storchaka
Steven D'Aprano
Victor Stinner
Benjamin Peterson
Kushal Das
Stefan Krah
Steven D'Aprano
Berker Peksag
Nick Coghlan
Christian Heimes
Larry Hastings