From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2005-12-07T04:56:20+09:00
Subject: Re: Shuffling an array, sort_by{rand}'s bias (was Re: need some Ruby

Stephen Waits wrote:

> * On rand(1000000000); chose 1billion rather arbitrarily to keep things 
> out of the range of BigNum.  Oddly, using 2^31-1 caused BigNums to show 
> up.  Ideally we'd use the largest FixNum, but I don't know how to 
> retrieve that.

2**30 - 1 is reliably a fixnum (though I guess it might not be the 
biggest one on some platforms).

-- 
        vjoel : Joel VanderWerf : path berkeley edu : 510 665 3407