compute mean in python for a generator

Question

I\'m doing some statistics work, I have a (large) collection of random numbers to compute the mean of, I\'d like to work with generators, because I just need to compute the

Answer 1

def my_mean(values):
    n = 0
    sum = 0
    for v in values:
        sum += v
        n += 1
    return sum/n

The above is very similar to your code, except by using for to iterate values you are good no matter if you get a list or an iterator. The python sum method is however very optimized, so unless the list is really, really long, you might be more happy temporarily storing the data.

(Also notice that since you are using python3, you don't need float(sum)/n)