[Tutor] What are these things urandom() returns?

[Alan Gauld]

> I'm thinking that just for the hell of it I could use urandom() as a
> source of random decimal digits. Or in a coin tossing program. 
> Here's
> a list of 7817 '1's and 0's generated by urandom():
>
> >>> from os import urandom
> >>> lst = list(urandom(1000000))
> >>> tosses = [y for y in lst if y in '01']
> >>> len(tosses)
> 7817
> >>>
>
> Would this be a better random source than choice([0,1]), which uses 
> random()?

It depends on what you mean by better.
Its not really any more random if thats what you mean,
it might be faster but I doubt if by much. I assume that
choice simply divides random by the number of options
and selects by index. In pseudo code:

def choice(seq):
    ran = random()  # number between 0,1
    num = 1/len(seq)  # 4 numbers means quarter interval?
    for n in range(1,len(seq)+1):
        if ran < num * n: break
    return seq[n-1]

That probably has some boundary errors but I'd guess its how it works,
and if written in C is probably faster than generating a big list then
extracting the 1s and zeros into another list.

But in matters of timing its better to test than guess... :-)

Alan G.