Don wrote: > There's a couple of difficult situations involving floating-point numbers. <snip> > * any floating point range which includes 0 is difficult, because there > are so many numbers which are almost zero. The probability of getting a > zero for an 80-bit real is so small that you probably wouldn't encounter > it in your lifetime. I think this weakens arguments based on analogy > with the integer case.
In that vein: for the floating-point case, do you want to emulate a “true” uniform random distribution in the range [x, y), or make every expressible IEEE 754 value in that range come out with equal likelihood? One is the logarithm of the other, in some sense. —Joel Salomon
