Call randint until you get enough bits of entropy to for a long with the appropriate number of bits.

def randwords(n):
  result = 0L
  for i in range(n):
    result = (result<<32) | randint(0,2<<32-1)
  return result

-Kevin


On 6/14/07, Will Woods <will.woods@ynic.york.ac.uk> wrote:

I want to choose a subset of all possible permutations of a sequence of
length N, with each element of the subset unique. This is then going to
be scattered across multiple machines using mpi. Since there is a
one-to-one mapping between the integers in the range 0 <= x < N! and the
possible permutations, one solution would be to choose M < N! integers
randomly, check for uniqueness, and then scatter only the integers so
that individual nodes can construct the permutations. However the
integers need to be of type long, and randint doesn't work for numbers
which cannot be converted to int. Any suggestions?
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