On Jun 10, 6:57 pm, Mensanator <mensana...@aol.com> wrote: > On Jun 10, 12:37 pm, Mark Dickinson <dicki...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Jun 10, 6:21 pm, Mensanator <mensana...@aol.com> wrote: > > > > So, the 2.6.2 documentation is STILL wrong. Before it implied > > > it was ALWAYS a semi-open interval, and now it says it's ALWAYS > > > a closed interval. But neither is correct. > > > Exactly which bit of the 2.6.2 documentation do you think is > > incorrect? The documentation for random.uniform says: > > > """Return a random floating point number N such that > > a <= N <= b for a <= b and b <= N <= a for b < a.""" > > > And that's precisely what it does. > > I didn't say it didn't. > > > Nowhere does the documentation say that *every* > > Unless qualified otherwise, that statement implies "for all (a,b)".
Sure. For all a <= b, it's true that a <= uniform(a, b) <= b. And similarly for b <= a. I really don't see the problem: the documentation is both technically correct and useful in practice. The assertion implicit in the name and description of the random.uniform function is that, to a very good approximation, the values produced by random.uniform(a, b) will be uniformly distributed on the closed interval [a, b]. And that's true (at least within the limits of floating-point arithmetic). Can you think of a single practical situation where it would matter that, for some values of a and b, uniform(a, b) can never produce the value b? Mark -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
