On Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 10:02 AM, Thomas DuBuisson
All, I have updated the ticket/patch for this proposal [1]. It seems the community has agreed on
class RandomGen g where next :: g -> (Int, g) genRange :: g -> (Int,Int) genRange _ = (minBound, maxBound)
class (RandomGen g) => SplittableGen g where split :: g -> (g, g)
Notice SPJs good catch that SplittableGen should be constrained by RandomGen is there (lacking discussion, but its hard to imagine objection). I'm not sure what you, Jan, mean by removing Read and Show constraints as I don't see any.
This will break the following hackage packages (thanks Bas): mage, synthesizer, synthesizer-core, Haskelloids, ideas, local-search, comonad-random, SpaceInvaders, rsagl, pkcs1, and hsgsom
All BCCed, of these only PKCS1 doesn't have a maintainer (a production pkcs1 probably shouldn't be using split anyway).
Cheers, Thomas
What impact does this have on the 'Random' class? Has someone already brought this up? The patch on the ticket doesn't seem to touch it. It seems that it becomes less powerful. I'm not necessarily opposed, but I just wanted to make sure it was stated explicitly. This seems that some structures which could have been randomly created lazily must now be more strict (and the instance must be re-written). I'm not sure that such instances exist, but they could be useful. Antoine