[with patch, positive review] multinomial to accept lists as argument too

[rishi]

I have modified multinomial to accept lists as argument too. It makes programming with it much easier

[ncohen]

Seems ok to me ! I Applied it, used it, and did not understand why it was not possible already !

By the way, I added some docstrings to the function, so if you think it is ok.. ;-)

[ncohen]

patch reviewed + some docstrings

[rishi]

Replying to ncohen:

Seems ok to me ! I Applied it, used it, and did not understand why it was not possible already !

By the way, I added some docstrings to the function, so if you think it is ok.. ;-)

Thanks for the docstrings.

[mvngu]

ncohen's reviewer patch

[mvngu]

The patch multinomial_list.patch contains some badly formatted docstrings. But those shouldn't prevent the patch from being merged. Better to fix those formatting issues in a separate ticket. See #6845 for a follow up to fix this docstring issue.

ncohen -- Your username should be in your patches; it makes it easier to credit you for your contributions. Please also remember to put in a sensible commit message for your patches.

While merging and testing these patches:

1. 12846.patch -- rishi's contribution
2. trac_6819-reviewer.patch -- ncohen's contribution

I ran into a doctest failure:

sage -t -long devel/sage-main/sage/misc/getusage.py
**********************************************************************
File "/scratch/mvngu/release/sage-4.1.1/devel/sage-main/sage/misc/getusage.py", line 69:
    sage: get_memory_usage(t)          # amount of memory more than when we defined t.
Expected:
    0.0
Got:
    0.34375
**********************************************************************
1 items had failures:
   1 of   4 in __main__.example_2
***Test Failed*** 1 failures.
For whitespace errors, see the file /scratch/mvngu/release/sage-4.1.1/tmp/.doctest_getusage.py
	 [2.6 s]

This has nothing to do with the above patches. Strangely, it crops up when I run the test on sage.math. But the test passes on mod.math and geom.math. Merged patches in this order:

1. 12846.patch
2. trac_6819-reviewer.patch