Mark Dickinson <dicki...@gmail.com> added the comment: The distinction between < and <= is fairly meaningless when applied to a computed floating-point result. I think the docs should be fixed to replace the < with <=. In any case, the b <= N < a bit has the inequalities the wrong way around: presumably it was intended to read b < N <= a. The docs for random.triangular should also be fixed in the same way.
(N.B. What *is* always true is that the result of random.random() is never 1.0. And that's a useful property---without it, random.uniform(a, b) can even return values *outside* the closed interval [a, b].) To me, it doesn't seem worth slowing down random.uniform itself with extra checks: it's the sort of function that often gets called millions of times within a simulation, or numerical algorithm (e.g. Monte-Carlo integration), and it's trivial for the user to add his or her own check if necessary. I also think it's a nice property that random.uniform currently degrades gracefully when a == b, producing the expected point distribution at a. I wouldn't want to change that. So: +1 for amending the docs. -1 for changing random.uniform. ---------- nosy: +marketdickinson versions: +Python 2.6, Python 2.7, Python 3.1 _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue4979> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
