On Wednesday, 24 June 2015 at 14:28:52 UTC, Joseph Rushton
Wakeling wrote:
On Wednesday, 24 June 2015 at 14:16:04 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
I certainly don't mind putting this on the back burner until
"what a proper solution looks like" is ironed out.
I'm sympathetic to this approach. I wouldn't get too far ahead of
yourself though. The easier it is for people to switch to your
new approach the better (which seems interesting, I loved your
DConf talk).
It seems like you are focused on the core random number
generators at the moment. I don't have much experience working on
them, but I do with statistics and statistical packages more
generally. Some language's statistical support is better
organized than others. For instance, python has numpy.random and
scipy.stats and both of them can generate random variables from a
variety of different distributions. scipy.stats by itself isn't
that bad, I suppose. It has a similar set-up as Julia's
Distributions.jl. They're both more than just random number
generators, allowing a variety of functions (pdfs, cdfs, etc). It
seems like they both take a class approach using a lot of
inheritance.
