[FWP] Weighted sampling

["Bernie Cosell" <bernie@fantasyfarm.com>]

This is probably pretty trivial stuff, but I was surprised at how easy it 
turned out to be [and the 'surprise' counted as fun for me].

The problem: I have a weighted distribution that I need to sample from.  
I have an array of the 'weights' associated with each sample.  So I did:

my @dist ;
foreach my $i (0 .. $#weights)
{   push @dist, ($i) x $weights[$i] ; }

sub sample
{   return $dist[rand(@dist)] ; }

  /Bernie\
-- 
Bernie Cosell                     Fantasy Farm Fibers
mailto:bernie@fantasyfarm.com     Pearisburg, VA
    -->  Too many people, too few sheep  <--          

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