It was once available so that faster generators could be substituted. Now,
that is less necessary and preferrably done via subclassing.
Also, clarified and shortened the comments for sample().
Added design notes in comments.
Used better variable names.
Eliminated the unsavory "pool[-k:]" which was an aspiring bug (for k==0).
Used if/else to show the two algorithms in parallel style.
Added one more test assertion.
Loosened the acceptable 'start' and 'stop' arguments so that any
Python (bounded) ints can be used. So, e.g., randrange(-sys.maxint-1,
sys.maxint) no longer blows up.
and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
results now.
Bugfix candidate (random.gauss() has always been broken in this way),
despite that it may change results.
_verify(): Pass in the values of globals insted of eval()ing their
names. The use of eval() was obscure and unnecessary, and the patch
claimed random.py couldn't be used in Jython applets because of it.
also modified check_all function to suppress all warnings since they aren't
relevant to what this test is doing (allows quiet checking of regsub, for
instance)
internal states. Put the old .seed() (which could only get at about
the square root of the # of possibilities) under the new name .whseed(),
for bit-level compatibility with older versions. This occurred to me
while reviewing effbot's book (he found himself stumbling over .seed()
more than once there ...).
