Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:10:29 -0800, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote: > 4. While we're at it, should uniform(a, b) generate by default something > in [a, b] or [a, b)? Someone once explained to me that generating [a, b] > for floating point numbers is the source of all evils and that Hitler, > Stalin and Kim Il Sung (should he still be alive) must be using that > kind of generator. Conversely, generating [a, b) is guaranteed to bring > in the long term everlasting peace to Earth. My problem however is that > in the integer realm I always want to generate [a, b]. Furthermore, I > wouldn't be happy if the shape of the interval was different for > integers and floating point numbers. How to break this conundrum?
I'm used to float generators [0,1] and integer generators [0,max). OTOH, if uniform(0.0,256.0) is uniform [0.0,256.0) then cast(int)(uniform(0.0,256.0)) is also uniform [0,256) which is good.
