"Kenneth" <kdw### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> "Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> > Alain <kua### [at] videotronca> wrote:
> >
> > > All values are equally possible, including 0 and 1. The mantissa for a
> > > float is about 52 bits IIRC, so, you have a 1 in 2^52 chances of getting
> > > a 0 and the same of getting a 1. Very small but not zero chance.
> >
> > So then maybe round to the nearest Q decimal place to "compress" the range and
> > increase the likelihood of getting a 1 or a 0.
> >
>
> Compressing the range is an interesting concept, that I wasn't aware of. I'll
> give some thought to the formula presented there. But I would suspect that
> POV-Ray's internal rounding would be *either* 'round up' OR 'round down', but
> not both (?) In other words, a 1.0 (but never a 0.0), OR a 0.0 (but never a
> 1.0).

I did find the topic of rounding to be more complex than my initial naive
concept.  There are different ways to do it, and it would be useful and
instructive to see examples of code that performed all the different variations.

Likewise, it would likely be useful for people writing code that requires
variations of inclusive / exclusive bounds to be able to

(0, 5) = 1, 2, 3, 4
(0, 5] = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
[0, 5) = 0, 1, 2, 3, 4
[0, 5] = 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5


It would also be informative to know just what the probability of any given rand
() result is, given the starting arguments / formulation.

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