[Python-Dev] Unittests (original) (raw)

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