Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettin...@gmail.com> added the comment:
The point of the "u = 1.0 - self.random()" line was to prevent the case where *u* was exactly equal to zero; however, as you noted, raising a very small number to a small can round down to zero. We could wrap the calculation in a try/except to catch the ZeroDivisionError but that is probably insufficient. The codomain can easily spew beyond the range of a C double: >>> alpha = 0.01 >>> u = 0.005 >>> 1.0 / u ** (1.0 / alpha) 1.2676506002282268e+230 <== Huge! We could clamp the values as is done in gammavariate(). Or we can raise a clean Overflow or Underflow exception but that would be unpleasant for users if it were to arise unexpectedly. ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <https://bugs.python.org/issue41421> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
