
I'm looking at Control.Monad.Random which provides the Rand monad. I would like to know how to use this for generating multiple infinite series, while trusting that the implementation never uses "split" behind the scenes. (Note: I'm on Windows XP, and there appears to be a bug in getStdGen. It does NOT return an arbitrary generator, but rather the same one every time I run the program. However, newStdGen DOES return an arbitrary generator. So I'm using that, even though I know it accesses split behind the scenes. My thinking is that this only happens once so it is okay.) For example, is this code split-free? simple :: Rand StdGen [Int] simple = getRandomRs (0::Int, 10) main1 = do gen <- newStdGen let answer = (flip evalRand) gen $ do xs <- simple ys <- simple return $ (take 5 xs) ++ (take 3 ys) print answer Then, to elaborate on my specific problem, I need to create special types of infinite series. For example, I might need to create one that looks like this: 0 0 5 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 5 0 9 0 0 8 ... The pattern here is that there is some random number of zeros followed by a single non-zero value, followed again by a random number of zeros, etc. forever. This is one way to implement this. Does all look well here? makeSeries :: [Int] -> [a] -> a -> [a] makeSeries (i:is) (f:fs) zero = replicate i zero ++ [f] ++ makeSeries is fs zero lessSimple :: Rand StdGen [Int] lessSimple = do counts <- getRandomRs (1::Int , 5 ) values <- getRandomRs (1::Int , 9 ) return $ makeSeries counts values 0 main2 = do gen <- newStdGen let answer = evalRand lessSimple gen print . take 20 $ answer We could even have several of these series zipped together. Is this split-free? main3 = do gen <- newStdGen let fs = (flip evalRand) gen $ do s1 <- lessSimple s2 <- lessSimple return $ zip s1 s2 print . take 20 $ fs