[Python-Dev] Unittests

Skip Montanaro skip@pobox.com
Wed, 10 Apr 2002 13:06:46 -0500


It's time for Tim to chime in here.  I'm sure he can explain/justify his
motives much better than I can.  I have never claimed to be able to channel
a bot.

You stated

    There's nothing bad in the .seed() method. You just have to pass it
    some sane values (rather than relying on the defaults).

The problem as I see it is that almost everybody who uses whrandom calls the
seed method implicitly with the default values.  If the defaults are bad
choices, then you will get suboptimal sequences.  In fact, when Tim wrote
the seed method for the WH generator in random.py he didn't just change the
defaults.  He changed the algorithm used to seed the generator itself.

Skip