Please do! It's actually an open issue:
https://github.com/JuliaStats/Distributions.jl/issues/197
but there is no reason we can't do it now for Distributions that don't call 
Rmath code (such as Exponential). 

Simon

On Thursday, 2 October 2014 23:58:09 UTC+1, Andrew Dolgert wrote:
>
> 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]> 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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