Thanks for the feedback folks... Some good comments. I will try to incorporate them next time.

I did have a bit of a hard time wording it. The goal was to allow you to run the entire script however many times and compare the results from #1 to #2 and not different generations of #1 to each other and #2 to each other. That didn't always come out, so it could have been worded better.

The "consistently" was inserted later to deal with the "1 in a billion" chance that a run of the SELECT...INTO happened to generate a quarter million values all outside of the 3-5 range....which would be the exception where #1 and #2 WOULD in fact be the same. Not likely, but possible.

I do like Philip's rewrite - but it still doesn't quite get to to heart of comparing #1 to #2. You'd have to reword as:

"Would statement #1 always generate a result identical to #2's ?" (answer - no, not always, but once in a blue blue moon, perhaps)

Anyway - as said before - I will take these into account next time..:)