>and certainly RAND() cannot return 1.

I'll address only this aspect of your message. A bunch of us fought to have RAND() return only one of 0 and 1. Otherwise, it's too hard to spread the return value evenly over a range.

Before VFP 5, RAND() could return both 0 and 1, each of them rarely. It made turning random values into a range (m,n) very difficult. With no 1's, we can also do INT(n * RAND()) + 1 to get values from 1 to n and know they'll be properly distributed.

Tamar