On Jun 9, 11:24 pm, Steven D'Aprano <ste...@remove.this.cybersource.com.au> wrote: > On Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:28:23 -0700, John Yeung wrote: > > The docs are now... sort of correct. For some values of a and b, > > uniform() can never return b. Notably, I believe uniform(0, 1) is > > equivalent to random(), and will never return 1. However, uniform(1, 2) > > CAN return 2, if this is any indication: > > >>>> a=0.0 > >>>> b=1.0 > >>>> a+(b-a)*z < b > > True > >>>> a=1.0 > >>>> b=2.0 > >>>> a+(b-a)*z < b > > False > > But you haven't shown what value z has, so there's no way of interpreting > that example.
I'm pretty aggressive about snipping. I left off the quote of z from Gabriel. He chose z to be the largest value that random.random() can return; namely, the largest float smaller than 1. I've just carried over that value into my example. The point of my example is, with z < 1, uniform(0, 1) is always less than 1, but with z < 1, uniform(1, 2) can be 2, according to Gabriel's description of uniform(). Therefore, to me the most up-to-date docs (which say that uniform(a, b) returns a float in the closed interval [a, b]) is closer to correct than before, but still fails to point out the full subtlety of the behavior. John -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
