Steven: Your point about population versus sample makes sense and your point that altering their names would be a breaking change is especially important.  I think that pretty well puts an end to my suggestion of alternative names and says the current pattern should be kept with NormalDist.

I particularly like the idea of using the TI Nspire and Casio Classpad to guide or help confirm what symbols might be recognizable to secondary students or 1st year university students.


Raymond: As an idea for examples demonstrating the code, what about an example where a plot of pdf is created, possibly for comparison with cdf?  This would require something like matplotlib but would help to visually communicate the concepts of pdf, perhaps with different sigma values?