Should uniform(-real.max, real.max) be inf?

[Magnus Lie Hetland]

What's the preferred way of generating a random floating-point number 
in the range of a given floating-point type? We have uniform!T() for 
integral types, but nothing similar for floats? And uniform(-real.max, 
real.max) (possibly tweaking the limits) seems to only return inf, 
which isn't terribly helpful.

What's the standard thing to do here? I could just use

  uniform(cast(T) -1, cast(T) 1)*T.max

I guess (for some floating-point type T). Seems to work fine, at least.

Am I missing the obvious way to do it?

-- 
Magnus Lie Hetland
http://hetland.org