On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 11:36:28AM -0700, Raymond Hettinger wrote:
It's only broken in a theoretical sense. It's fun to think about, but I wouldn't lose any sleep over it.
It's not even broken in a theoretical sense. It does exactly what it says it does.
Besides, this whole conversation is somewhat senseless. You can't get any more randomness out of a generator than you put into the seed in the first place. If you're not putting thousands of digits in your seed, then no PRNG is going to give you an equal chance of producing every possible shuffle for a large list.
I agree with you--I just didn't want to make too strong of a statement. I certainly believe that any comment in the docs about this issue would be distracting and unhelpful. -- Andrew McNabb http://www.mcnabbs.org/andrew/ PGP Fingerprint: 8A17 B57C 6879 1863 DE55 8012 AB4D 6098 8826 6868