Ranges and random numbers -- again

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, June 18, 2013 10:27:11 Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> On 06/18/2013 08:06 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > It would probably be a pretty easy sell  though, since it can probably
> > stay
> > mostly the same aside from the struct -> class change (though at that
> > point, we might as well take the opportunity to  make sure that anything
> > else that should be redesigned about it gets  redesigned appropriately).
> 
> Yea, this is also my feeling, which is part of why I'm pushing this concept
> of "random ranges" -- I want to ensure that the related issues are properly
> understood and discussed and some well-thought-out design patterns are
> prepared in order to ensure good and statistically reliable functionality
> in std.random2.
> 
> One small note -- I'd have thought that a struct with an internal
> pointer-to-payload (allocated using manual memory management, not GC) would
> have been a superior design for pseudo-random number generators compared to
> making them final classes.  The latter is just the easiest thing to do for
> simple tests of PRNG-as-reference-type.

An internal payload might make more sense, but it probably needs to be done in 
a way that it can be controlled (which may require custom allocators), because 
even allocating with malloc all the time might be a problem for the guys who 
are really picky about memory stuff - though maybe that level of customization 
could be added later. I don't know. I also don't work in that kind of 
environment, so I don't know exactly what such programmers find acceptable.

- Jonathan M Davis