[Haskell-cafe] why is Random in System?

[Brandon Allbery]

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 17:07, James Cook <mokus at deepbondi.net> wrote:

> On Aug 16, 2011, at 4:04 PM, Evan Laforge wrote:
> > I've noticed there's a convention to put modules having to deal with
> > randomness into System.Random.  I thought System was for OS
> > interaction?  Granted getting a random seed usually means going to the
> > OS, but isn't the rest of it, like generating random sequences,
> > distributions, selecting based on probability, shuffling, etc. all
> > non-OS related algorithms?
>
> System definitely does seem like an odd choice.  In most cases the only
> interaction any PRNG, even when accessed via the FFI, has with the "system"
> is - as you say - to get an initial seed value for a global instance.
>

I'd be tempted to guess that the whole reason it's under System is the IO
component.

-- 
brandon s allbery                                      allbery.b at gmail.com
wandering unix systems administrator (available)     (412) 475-9364 vm/sms
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