Brandon Allbery
I've noticed there's a convention to put modules having to deal with randomness into System.Random. I thought System was for OS interaction? Granted getting a random seed usually means going to the OS, but isn't the rest of it, like generating random sequences, distributions, selecting based on probability, shuffling, etc. all non-OS related algorithms?
System definitely does seem like an odd choice. In most cases the only interaction any PRNG, even when accessed via the FFI, has with the "system" is - as you say - to get an initial seed value for a global instance.
I'd be tempted to guess that the whole reason it's under System is the IO component.
That's not really valid, is it? After all the new 'time' package is also stationed under the Data tree, and it has a similarly large IO component. I have to say, it seems very intuitive to me to look for it under Data, even though I'm not sure why. Probably I'm just used to it. Time has a strong connection to the operating system and the hardware, so it could just as well go into the System tree. For (non-cryptographic) randomness however we are dealing with numerical data, for which the connection to the system is mere convenience, so I wouldn't mind finding it under Data at all. Greets, Ertugrul -- nightmare = unsafePerformIO (getWrongWife >>= sex) http://ertes.de/