On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 6:50 PM, Phil Steitz <phil.ste...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/23/11 4:36 PM, Ted Dunning wrote: > > I think it isn't much to worry about forcing all the current stuff into > an > > unnatural structure for use cases that are not particularly common. > > > > The cases that I have seen for distributions over non-reals are > permutations > > and graphs. In neither case did I feel an urge to file a bug against > > java.lang.Random because it returned a primitive double. > > The one exception is our own IntegerDistribution, which is arguably > being forced into an unnatural structure because its sample space is > being artificially extended to R. I am not sure how unnatural it > would be to just have the probability functions take a class > parameter. I agree, though, that if there is no compelling > practical need, we should keep it simple. Could be in that case, > though, that it might be better to pull DiscreteDistribution out of > the hierarchy and have its probability functions take ints rather > than doubles. IIRC, I argued for that years ago, but others thought > it better to go with a single-rooted hierarchy. > My experience with R leads me to think that integers embedded in R isn't a big deal. It isn't even something that I often notice. The problem is things that don't embed nicely in floating point representations (like permutations).
