On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 11:48 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 10:56:21AM +1000, Chris Angelico wrote:
You can say that about algorithms easily enough. My point is that this ought to be a constraint on the function - implementations may choose other algorithms, but they MUST follow one pattern or the other, meaning that a Python script can depend on it without knowing the implementation. Like guaranteeing that list.sort() is stable without stipulating the actual sort algo used.
I cannot imagine an algorithm that wasn't totally brain-dead (like "flip a coin") which could wrongly report a prime number as composite. Maybe I'm not imaginative enough :-)
Haha. Okay. I'm not familiar with every possible primality test, so I had no idea that they ALL have the same failure mode :) ChrisA