On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 12:51:13PM -0500, Tim Peters wrote:
[Tim]
... No attempt to be minimal here. More-than-less "obvious" is more important:
Bound methods of a SystemRandom instance .randrange() .randint() .randbits() renamed from .getrandbits() .randbelow(exclusive_upper_bound) renamed from private ._randbelow() .choice()
[Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info>]
While we're bike-shedding,
I refuse to bikeshed on this. I posted a concrete proposal just to enrage others into it ;-) So I'll just sketch my thinking:
Consider me enraged. Hulk smash puny humans! [...]
When would somebody use randbelow(n) rather than randrange(n)?
For the same reason they'd use randbits(n) instead of randrange(1 << n) ;-) That is, familiarity and obviousness.
Okay, that makes sense.
Are there use-cases for a strong random float between 0 and 1? If so, is it sufficient to say secrets.randbelow(sys.maxsize)/sys.maxsize, or should we offer secrets.random() and/or secrets.uniform(a, b)?
I don't know of any "security use" for random floats. But if you want to add a recipe to the docs, point them to SystemRandom.random instead. That gets it right.
Good enough for me. -- Steve