Re: [Caml-list] Re: exception safety / RAII ?

[Damien Doligez <damien.doligez@inria.fr>]

On Mar 8, 2005, at 22:56, Oliver Bandel wrote:

> P.S.: I tried Random.float max_float and it seems to be always between
>        1.<something> * 10^307 ...  1.<something> * 10^308
>       Is this a problem of initialization, or a problem of the 
> Random-algorithm,
>       or a kind of strange (?) behaviour of a random walk?

I've seen some 10^306 too.  If you think about it, 99% of the reals
between 0 and 10^308 are in the 10^306..10^308 range.

But it's true that there is a "problem": roughly speaking, Random.float
simply takes a (uniformly distributed) real between 0 and 1, rounds it
to the nearest float, and multiplies by its argument.  So in your case
it will never return a number greater than 0 and smaller than
epsilon * max_float.

It's not clear what the spec should be anyway.  If you want a uniform
distribution on the real interval and rounding to the nearest float,
then the missing result range has a vanishingly small probability
anyway.  If you want a uniform distribution on the (finite) set of
floats in the interval, you will get really counter-intuitive results
and a function that cannot be used for physical simulations.

-- Damien