[Haskell-cafe] R wrapper in haskell

Peng Zhang pczhang at gmail.com
Sun Feb 25 17:11:32 EST 2007


Thanks for the reply.

On 2/25/07, Marc Weber <marco-oweber at gmx.de> wrote:
> > time-consuming and it takes months in R. I like the language very much
> > so far, but I do miss some important functions in R which can generate
>                                                     ^ typo ? ;)
> > But for rnorm, if I use "foreign import ccall rnorm :: Double -> Double
> > -> IO Double", then my main function should carry IO monad all the time.
> > Maybe the better way is that I should "encapsulate" it into a state
> > monad rng -> (rng, randomnumber). Therefore for rnorm, I should first
> > write a wrapper in c like
> > seed2 rnorm_wrapper(seed1, parameters){
> >       set_seed(seed1);
> >       rnorm(parameters);
> >       get_seed(seed2);
> > }
> set_seed
> rnorm
> get_seed
> doesn't have any side effect as long as you consider this sequence beeing

rnorm itself has side effect, right? It changes the seed for global
random generator.
That is why I think I need rnorm_wrapper to "purify" it.

> atomic. If you don't use multithreading it should work fine.  If you want to
> use multithreading have a look at
> http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/Concurrency, especially at
> "Software Transactional Memory (STM)" which is what you might need here (?)
> > and then write another wrapper for rnorm_wrapper in haskell.
> >
> > Can somebody tell me if this is the right approach? Thank you!
>
> Have a look at (haskell.org -> library and tools -> Mathematics
> (http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Libraries_and_tools/Mathematics)
> library "Probabilistic Functional Programming"
> Perhaps this lib does exactly what you need.

I did see this, but I think it is not enough for me.

>
> There is another important source of packages:
> http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/pkg-list.html
>
> Which way to go? I'm not a haskell expert so I can't tell you.
> It depends on what you need and how much time you want to spent on this topic ;)
>
> hope this helps
> Marc Weber
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