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

[Magnus Lie Hetland]

On 2012-03-01 16:34:23 +0000, Ali Çehreli said:

> I recommend reading this page:
> 
>    http://dlang.org/d-floating-point.html
> 

Thanks.

> Especially the ASCII graph there is very interesting. The number of 
> distinct values between T.min_normal and 1 are equal to the distinct 
> values between 1 and T.max
> .

Ah -- right.

> Since there are also sub-normal values between 0 and T.min_normal, it 
> may make sense to use the range [T.min_normal, 1) and scale the result 
> from there.

Hm. Seems reasonable.

> But I haven't tested whether the distinct values in that range are 
> equally distributed.

At the moment, I'm just using this for test-case generation, so 
anything close to a reasonable approximation is fine :)

However: Perhaps it would be useful with a uniform!real() or the like 
in Phobos? Or is that (because of the vagaries of FP) a weird thing to 
do, inviting misunderstandings and odd behavior? Perhaps it's been left 
out for a reason? (Sounds sort of likely ;-)

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