On further consideration... On 01/08/13 10:01, Peter Levart wrote:
- accumulate(long x) returns the post-modification value of the modified cell or base (the returned value of the function that was used to update the state) - the accumulator function is always called for initial allocations of cells (with identity value as 1st argument, like when accumulating on the base) - the original code optimizes this situation and just installs the parameter x into the cell.
... I'm no longer seeing a reason to support this kind of use, even with "protected" methods. The particular cells used, even for a particular thread, can and do change over time, so returning the pre-accumulate value for the cell used means only "this was at some moment a partial accumulation value". The next one returned after another call might be completely unrelated. The only possible uses I can imagine, for example a not-at-all random progress sampling mechanism, can be done in better ways. And as you showed, while you could make a sort of RNG out of it, it is not competitive with ThreadLocalRandom, and has unknowable statistical properties. So for now anyway, I don't plan on doing this. Thanks for the opportunity to do these thought experiments though :-) -Doug
