# Is there a name for $[0,1]$?

When writing software, there are often situations where I need a parameter to be a floating point number $x \in [0,1]$. I don't know of a name for that category, but I think there must be one because it's such a useful categories. Perhaps there's a name in probability theory?

(If they don't have a name, I hereby declare them to be "wombat numbers".)

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It's just the closed interval [0,1] –  Charles Siegel Aug 14 '10 at 23:35
(tongue-in-cheek) Since there's no such thing as "irrational" or "transcendental" in floating-point... maybe "proper fractions"? –  Ｊ. Ｍ. Aug 15 '10 at 0:23
Just a curiosity: In Romanian they are sometimes called subunitary numbers (although it sometimes means in [-1,1]). Apparently in English "subunitary" is reserved for matrices. –  rgrig Aug 15 '10 at 5:51
Not sure I've seen "subunitary" in use, but "unitary" is indeed an adjective frequently used in the theory of matrices. –  Ｊ. Ｍ. Aug 15 '10 at 12:31
I'm running into the same question wrt probability numbers. Since all of the "official" answers seem to be multiword ("property fraction", "unit interval"), I'm going to go ahead and accept your declaration of "wombat" numbers, with my code reading getFloat(), getInt(), getWombat(). –  James Beninger Sep 22 '13 at 2:35