On 11/22/16 7:30 PM, John Colvin wrote:
On Tuesday, 22 November 2016 at 23:55:01 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 11/22/16 1:31 AM, Ilya Yaroshenko wrote:
- `opCall` API instead of range interface is used (similar to C++)
This seems like a gratuitous departure from common D practice. Random
number generators are most naturally modeled in D as infinite ranges.
-- Andrei
I'm pretty sure everyone *wants* it to be a range, but it turns out it's
a difficult design space. Lot's of nasty trade-offs that can be (and
have been) argued back and forth depending on your priorities.
The proposed design has disabled copy ctor and uses opCall() for a new
element. That seems to be a difference without a distinction from an
input range that has disabled copy ctor and offers the input range
primitives.
Perhaps you have an insight that has been missed that can make a good
rng range without causing less than optimal performance or statistically
unsafe default behaviour?
We should add a reference RNG that transforms any other RNG into an
input range that shares the actual RNG.
IIRC you think people are making too much fuss about the statistically
safe default behaviour, but it would be interesting to hear a more
expanded version of that view.
I'm unclear on what that statistically unsafe default behavior is - my
understanding is it has to do with RNGs being inadvertently copied. It
would be great to formalize that in a well-explained issue.
Andrei
