"fumanchu" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > I'm surprised noone has pursued a course of subtraction rather than > division.
I believe someone did mention the subtraction method in one of the initial responses. But the problem is this. If you independently sample n numbers from a given distribution and then rescale, then the scaled numbers still all have the same distribution (and are uniform in that sense). In the subtraction method, each comes from a differnt distribution, as others explained, with the nth being radically different from the first. Terry Jan Reedy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list