RFR 8023155: Ensure functional consistency across Random, ThreadLocalRandom, SplittableRandom

[Mike Duigou]

- documentation of "bound" should mention that it is exclusive rather than relying on the return documentation.

- I find disallowing the zero bounds and empty ranges slightly annoying. It requires me to externally special case for situations such as:

Random ran = new Random();
String[] users = {"Fred"}; 

someUser = users[mine.nextInt(users.length - 1)];

This is a frequently used idiom. Yes, forcing the random number generator to return zero is silly but for symmetry it is convenient. An empty range isn't an obvious error (though the "String[] users = {};" case is obviously an error).

On Aug 19 2013, at 04:07 , Paul Sandoz wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> This patch updates Random and ThreadLocalRandom to have functional consistency (for the most part) across Random, ThreadLocalRandom and SplittableRandom:
> 
>  http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~psandoz/tl/JDK-8023155-Random-TLR-SR-sync/webrev/
> 
>  http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~psandoz/tl/JDK-8023155-Random-TLR-SR-sync/specdiff/overview-summary.html
> 
> I have yet to define a common interface e.g. RandomGenerator that Random, ThreadLocalRandom and SplittableRandom could implement, but it would be very easy to do so. Any thoughts on doing this?

Seems worthwhile. 

Mike