[Haskell-cafe] Re: permuting a list

Heinrich Apfelmus writes:

The answer is a resounding "yes" and the main idea is that shuffling a list is *essentially the same* as sorting a list; the minor difference being that the former chooses a permutation at random while the latter chooses a very particular permutation, namely the one that sorts the input.

For the full exposition, see

http://apfelmus.nfshost.com/random-permutations.html

I haven't been following the thread, but my initial reaction would have been something like use System.Random.randoms to get a list rs and then do (roughly) randomPerm = map snd . sortBy (compare `on` fst) . zip rs How bad is that? I mean, how unfair does it get? -- Jón Fairbairn Jon.Fairbairn@cl.cam.ac.uk http://www.chaos.org.uk/~jf/Stuff-I-dont-want.html (updated 2009-01-31)