I'd like to make some comments about randomness in wg1, recently discussed on wg1 mailing-list.
As a physicist who has worked with simulations for long time, I think that it would be very valuable to have a good quality pseudo random number generator, at least as a module, and I strongly agree with Bradley Lucier about the properties that a PRNG should have. Simulations could probably be classified as "real world programming", and then in the scope of WG2, but I feel there are good reasons to have PRNG in WG1: 1. Often a 'small language' is enought for simulations, I will be disappointed in being forced to use a 'large language' *only* for PRNG. 2. Not being strong enough for cryptographical application is not a issue: I think nobody would have this expectation for a built-in PRNG. 3. OTOH being strong enough for simulation is a great improvement for portability, and this is an explicit goal for WG1. 4. Srfi-27 is already widely adopted, according to: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tRCHK6jWXuKMABKAfoOwWqw&output=html It's true that prescribe a specific PRNG is unusual, but it could be justified by two reasons: a) the implementation is simple, b) today most of mainstream languages are defined by a single implementation (or a dominant one); I see great value in scheme not being defined this way, and if I understand correctly the steering committe position statement, the main goal of the report is to reduce the drawbacks of diversity of scheme's constituencies. Reliabilty of PRNG between implementations would be a huge step, at least for scientific computing, in the direction of "construct better programs in better ways: quickly, easily, robustly, scalably, correctly". --marco _______________________________________________ Scheme-reports mailing list [email protected] http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports
