On Jun 10, 8:15 pm, Robert Kern <robert.k...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 2009-06-10 13:53, Terry Reedy wrote: > > A full technical discussion does not below in the docs, in my opinion. A > > wike article would be fine. > > True. However, a brief note that "Due to floating point arithmetic, for some > values of a and b, b may or may not be one of the possible generated results." > might be worthwhile. The actual details of *why* this is the case can be > discussed elsewhere.
I find it difficult to see how such a disclaimer would have any practical value, without also knowing *which* values of a and b are affected. It can certainly be useful to know that endpoints *aren't* included where that's true. For example, knowing that random.random() can never produce the value 1.0 means that one can safely generate a mean 1 exponential variate with -log(1-random.random()), without worrying about the possibility of taking log of 0. But I don't know why it would be useful to know that endpoints *are* sometimes included, without knowing exactly when. Mark -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
