On Sat, Sep 19, 2015 at 06:40:32PM -0500, Tim Peters wrote:
[Guido]
Thanks! I'd accept this (and I'd reject 504 at the same time). I like the secrets name. I wonder though, should the PEP propose a specific set of functions? (With the understanding that we might add more later.)
The bikeshedding on that will be far more tedious than the implementation. I'll get it started :-)
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()
While we're bike-shedding, I don't know that I like the name randbits, since that always makes me expect a sequence of 0, 1 bits. But that's a minor point. When would somebody use randbelow(n) rather than randrange(n)? Apart from the possible redundancy between rand[below|range], all the above seem reasonable to me. 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)?
Token functions .token_bytes(nbytes) another name for os.urandom() .token_hex(nbytes) same, but return string of ASCII hex digits .token_url(nbytes) same, but return URL-safe base64-encoded ASCII
I suggest adding a default length, say nbytes=32, with a note that the default length is expected to increase in the future. Otherwise, how will the naive user know what counts as a good, hard-to-attack length? All of the above look good to me.
.token_alpha(alphabet, nchars) string of `nchars` characters drawn uniformly from `alphabet`
What is the intention for this function? To use as passwords? Other than that, it's not obvious to me what that would be used for. -- Steve