Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettin...@gmail.com> added the comment: SystemRandom is a weird special case. Otherwise, almost every PRNG is going to need seed(), getstate(), and setstate(). A base class should each offer some reusable code to minimize the burden on the subclass:
* The existing seed method allows multiple input types to be collapsed to a long integer. A subclass can extend this as needed or can override it completely. This is useful and will tend to give a more consistent API across multiple RNGs. * The getstate/setstate methods take care of the gauss_next value and allow the seeding to be versioned. This is also useful and helps us insulate users from state related implementation details such as gauss_next. Please don't lose the above functionality by default. Also, please make sure that code written to the existing spec continues to work.¹ +1 on offering a PCG generator; however, it should an additional alternative to MT and SystemRandom rather than a replacement. Also, it needs to work well on 32-bit builds. Notes should be added that its state space is *much* smaller than MT, so shuffle() becomes state space limited at much smaller population sizes -- meaning that a large number of possible permutations become unreachable by shuffle() -- for example, to cover all possible shuffles for a deck of 52 playing cards requires 226 bits.² Also, I expect that PCG won't offer us the same performance advantage as it does for numpy because the MT code itself is only a fraction of the time in a call to random(); the rest of the time is in the function call overhead, converting the bytes to a C double, and creating a new Python float object. I would still like to see a PEP for this. ¹ https://code.activestate.com/recipes/576707/ ² factorial(52).bit_length() ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <https://bugs.python.org/issue40346> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
