Darn, now it's on me. I've read the codebase, and could add the feature 
with a little work. It's just a method on rand(), coupled with pulling 
code, such as ziggurat, out of Base.

Thanks,
Drew

On Wednesday, October 1, 2014 11:39:16 PM UTC-4, John Myles White wrote:
>
> Hi Andrew,
>
> It sounds like you've got a lot of interesting ideas for improving 
> Distributions.jl. Please read through the existing codebase when you've got 
> some time and submit pull requests for any functionality you'd like to see 
> changed.
>
> In regard to your main question, I don't believe we support special RNG's 
> in Distributions.
>
>  -- John
>
> On Oct 1, 2014, at 8:32 PM, Andrew Dolgert <[email protected] 
> <javascript:>> wrote:
>
> It doesn't seem possible to use an explicit random number generator to 
> sample a distribution:
>
> rng=MersenneTwister(seed)
> rand(Distributions.Exponential(scale), rng)
>
> Did I miss a way to do this?
>
> I want to use an explicit generator because
>  - I can serialize it and pick up where I left off with the next run
>  - I can use different generators in different parts of the program
>  - It's good hygiene for stochastic simulations to know when rand is used.
>
> Using quantile(distribution, rand(rng)) isn't great because it doesn't use 
> the accepted sampling algorithms. For instance, the ziggurat algorithm for 
> exponentials is far better than inverting the cdf.
>
> Thanks,
> Drew
>
>
>

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