default random object?

[Joel C. Salomon]

Don wrote:
> There's a couple of difficult situations involving floating-point numbers.
<snip>
> * any floating point range which includes 0 is difficult, because there
> are so many numbers which are almost zero. The probability of getting a
> zero for an 80-bit real is so small that you probably wouldn't encounter
> it in your lifetime. I think this weakens arguments based on analogy
> with the integer case.

In that vein: for the floating-point case, do you want to emulate a
“true” uniform random distribution in the range [x, y), or make every
expressible IEEE 754 value in that range come out with equal likelihood?
One is the logarithm of the other, in some sense.

—Joel Salomon