Thank you all for those most helpful suggestions! random.shuffle does precisely the job that I need quickly. Thank you for introducing me to itertools, though, I should have remembered APL did this in a symbol or two and I'm sure that itertools will come in handy in future.
Thanks for the warnings about random numbers too - I hope my lists will be short enough for the permutations of the function to be irrelevant. I don't need every single sequence to be unique, only that the same sequence only occurs occasionally. My lists might get up to the ~2k length one day, and I'll keep in mind the need, at that stage, to use a different pseudo-random generator. Actually, thinking about it, there is probably a source of non-algorithmically-derived 'random' numbers somewhere on the net that would do the job nicely. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list