[Haskell-cafe] why is Random in System?

[Ertugrul Soeylemez]

Brandon Allbery <allbery.b at gmail.com> 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.

That's not really valid, is it?  After all the new 'time' package is
also stationed under the Data tree, and it has a similarly large IO
component.  I have to say, it seems very intuitive to me to look for it
under Data, even though I'm not sure why.  Probably I'm just used to it.
Time has a strong connection to the operating system and the hardware,
so it could just as well go into the System tree.  For
(non-cryptographic) randomness however we are dealing with numerical
data, for which the connection to the system is mere convenience, so I
wouldn't mind finding it under Data at all.


Greets,
Ertugrul


-- 
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