On Sat, Jun 30, 2018 at 12:14 PM Stephan Hoyer <sho...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I’d love to see a generic way of doing random number generation, but I > agree with Martin that I don’t see it fitting a naturally into this NEP. An > invasive change to add an array_reference argument to a bunch of functions > might indeed be worthy of its own NEP, but again I’m not convinced that’s > actually the right approach. I’d rather add a few new functions like > random_like, which is a small enough change that concensus on the list > might be enough. > random_like() seems very weird to me. It doesn't seem like a function that anyone actually wants. It seems like what people actually want is to be able to draw random numbers from any distribution as a specified array-like type and shape, not just sample U(0, 1) with the shape of an existing array. The most workable way to do this is to modify RandomGenerator (i.e. the new RandomState design)[1] to accept the array-like type in the class constructor, and modify its internals to do the right thing. Because the intrusion on the API is so small, that doesn't require a NEP, just a PR (a long, complicated, and tedious PR, to be sure)[2]. There are a bunch of technical issues (if you want to avoid memory copies) because the Cython implementation requires direct memory access, but that's intrinsic to any solution to this problem, regardless of the API choices. random_like() would have the same issues. [1] https://github.com/bashtage/randomgen [2] Sorry, Kevin. -- Robert Kern
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