On 5/28/26 12:25 AM, Tim Meehan wrote:
I think that (ice-9 random) has (random:normal). That would generate a
Gaussian random variate with mean zero and standard deviation 1.
On Wed, May 27, 2026 at 7:12 AM Zelphir Kaltstahl <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 5/27/26 7:19 AM, λx.x wrote:
> this is somewhat tangential; i am not necessarily talking of hashing,
but more
> cryptographic functions shipped with Guile as a whole.
>
> if Guile is going to ship with a cryptographic hash function, what about
other
> cryptographic functions? Are we satisfied with the RNG interfaces
provided in
> core and SRFI 27? whether they RNGs provided are cryptographically secure
> does not seem to be documented in the manual, at least not explicitly.
What I found lacking are functions normal/Gaussian distributed random number
generation. Last time I checked there was no such thing. Generating a normal
distribution from uniform distributions can be mathematically quite
challenging.
So many algorithms for approximation, and many of them requiring deep
mathematical understanding to understand when one such algorithm would yield
good enough results and when not, and what parameters to tweak to make it
suitable and so on and on. Or blindly copying without understanding and just
praying. Not very keen on having to improvise something like that, with
limited
mathematical understanding and Wikipedia being an impenetrable wall of
math for
such algorithms.
I went as far as checking NumPy, how normal distributed random numbers are
generated there, but the code sucks so hard, it is also impenetrable for
someone
not knowing the mathematical formula it tried to express and understanding
that
in turn. One letter variables or abbreviations everywhere, that no one other
than mathematicians will be able to interpret, with no regard for
readability at
all. Just like what one would expect a mathematician without any software
development experience to write : )
Having a good (and readable! perhaps with references!) algorithm for that
in the
standard library, or in a supported SRFI, or as an extension to a supported
SRFI, would be great. And the docs should of course state what purposes it
is
useful for and whether it is cryptographically secure or not.
Not that Python necessarily is the yardstick for all the things, but here
is its
standard library:
https://docs.python.org/3/library/random.html#random.gauss.
Best regards,
Zelphir
--
repositories: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl
Damn, how did I not find that, when I had the need. Feeling a bit stupid now.
Thanks for telling me.
Just out of curiosity, how did you learn about that function existing? Just
through procedure index of the manual and searching for "random" or "normal"?
Best regards,
Zelphir
--
repositories:https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl
