On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 6:31 PM, Dale Jordan <da...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> Can anyone explain why this is looping or point out a better way to
> generate an arbitrary-length random list while still being able to
> reuse the generator? (I'd rather not use split since this generator
> doesn't support it and its of dubious soundness.)
Well there is more than one way to split. You don't have to split the
generator -- if you act on a stream of random numbers, you can split
the stream also:
split :: [a] -> ([a],[a])
split (x:xs) = (x:bs,as)
where (as,bs) = split xs
However too much splitting in this case causes a performance penalty,
since you start discarding large portions of the stream. If you don't
want to split the generator, this is the only way I can think of that
is deterministic in the random seed.
If determinism is not required, as many times it is not with *random*
computations, you can use the value-supply package on hackage, which
uses a bit of unsafePerformIO magic to turn a serial stream into a
splittable stream. But you lose composable repeatability.
Luke
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