Gabriel Genellina wrote:
En Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:33:39 -0300, Esmail <ebo...@hotmail.com> escribió:

random.random() will generate a random value in the range [0, 1).

Is there an easy way to generate random values in the range [0, 1]?
I.e., including 1?

I think you shouldn't worry about that - the difference may be as small as 2**-53, or 0.0000000000000001

Ok, that's what I thought ...


random() guarantees a semi-open interval (could return 0, but never 1). But once you start to operate with the numbers, the limits become fuzzy.

a<b & n>0 => n.a<n.b

The above holds for real numbers but not always for floating point arithmetic, so one cannot guarantee the semi-open interval anymore:

py> a=10.0
py> b=11.0
py> z = 0.9999999999999999  # assume random.random returned this
py> z<1
True
py> a+(b-a)*z < b # the expression used for uniform(a,b)
False
py> a+(b-a)*z
11.0

The docs are already updated to reflect this:
http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Doc/library/random.rst?r1=68724&r2=68723&pathrev=68724

Thanks for the information Gabriel,
Esmail

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