On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 6:09 PM, Antoine Latter
I guess the new class interface feels somehow off to me.
As a developer, I would now say: "The function requires a random generator which exclusively produces Word16s" which I find oddly specific, and lowers the chances of me being able to use a single generator with disparately authored components without piles of newtype shims (and who know what else).
Maybe a better solution would be for the RandomGen class to provide a multitude of 'next' functions:
next :: g -> (Int, g) nextInt :: g -> (Int, g) nextInt8 :: g -> (Int8, g) nextInt16 :: g -> (Int16, g) nextInt32 :: g -> (Int32, g) . . . nextWord :: g -> (Word, g) nextword8 :: g -> (Word8,g) . . . nextDouble :: g -> (Double, g)
The class methods other than 'next' would have a default implementation equivalent to the above value's Random instance.
Then as a consumer of a RandomGen, I can ask for the values I want, and the implementation of the RandomGen can provide efficiently what it can.
And then as a downstream developer I can benchmark like crazy to find the combination that works for me.
Plus, I don't think this requires additional extensions.
Antoine
All of this is predicated on specializing the random-data-consumer to the random-data-producer being a significant performance win. Antoine