Yves Parès
I've been in the past told that mersenne-random was much better than the standard random package.
This is relative. The Mersenne Twister algorithm has a large memory footprint, but in relation to the size of the average Haskell program, this is probably not much of an issue.
So is it possible to use the fast and efficient mersenne generator with the convenient and general random API?
No, because mersenne-random provides an impure generator with a global state, as is also pointed out by the Haddock documentation. As an alternative consider the mersenne-random-pure64 and the cprng-aes packages. Both provide the interface you want. Personally I prefer the cprng-aes package, because it is reasonably fast and convenient for non-cryptographic applications, but also provides a strong Crypto-API interface, if you need cryptographically strong random numbers. Greets, Ertugrul -- nightmare = unsafePerformIO (getWrongWife >>= sex) http://ertes.de/