[Scheme-reports] randomness in wg1

[Marco Benelli <mbenelli@x>]

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


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