Numpy Random Number Generators

Pablo Ripolles in-call at gmx.net
Fri May 1 13:59:47 PDT 2009


dsimcha Wrote:

> == Quote from Pablo Ripolles (in-call at gmx.net)'s article
> > dsimcha Wrote:
> > > == Quote from Andrei Alexandrescu (SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org)'s article
> > > > dsimcha wrote:
> > > > > I've ported a large portion of the Numpy random number generation library to
> > > > > D.  (I excluded the uniform random number generators because Phobos and Tango
> > > > > already have good implementations of these, and a few distributions because
> > > > > they were obscure and hard to test properly.  I may add the obscure
> > > > > probability distributions later.)
> > > > >
> > > > > The results appear pretty good  (I added unit tests that make sure the results
> > > > > are sane while I was at it).
> > > > >
> > > > > The module is licensed under the BSD license.  The code is available at:
> > > > > http://dsource.org/projects/dstats/browser/trunk/random.d
> > > > >
> > > > > Docs are at http://svn.dsource.org/projects/dstats/docs/random.html
> > > > > although there's not much there.  If you understand the probability
> > > > > distribution you're trying to sample from, it's pretty self-explanatory.  If
> > > > > not, a little bit of ddoc isn't going to help, and Wikipedia is probably a
> > > > > better choice.
> > > > >
> > > > These look great. Could I convince you to contribute them to Phobos?
> > > > Andrei
> > >
> > > I would certainly be willing to grant permission for these to be included in
> > > Phobos.  The only problem is the original code that I ported is BSD licensed,
> > > meaning you have to include all the relevant disclaimers.
> > Hello, I might be wrong but, as far as I know, the licenses apply to code and
> not to algorithms. That is, once you jump out of the original implementation (the
> original codes are not in d) and you re-implement the algorithms in another
> language (in this case d) the work is not, properly speaking, a derived work. I
> insist, I'm not a lawyer and I'm not 100% sure but that could be checked.
> > Cheers!
> 
> IDK, I mean, I cut and pasted the code into my D IDE and tweaked it to get it to
> compile and then did some statistical tests to make sure the distributions were
> still reproduced faithfully.  I didn't even change any of the variable names or
> code structure or anything in most cases.  It's a straight translation, not a real
> reimplementation.  I don't see how something like this could possibly *not* be
> considered a derivative work, and I think the people who wrote the original lib
> definitely deserve to be given credit.  It's just that some of the BSD legalese is
> a little bit of a PITA for code that's in a standard lib.

yeah, that makes sense.

cheers!




More information about the Digitalmars-d-announce mailing list