[Haskell-cafe] bitSize

[Steve Schafer]

On Fri, 26 Aug 2011 20:30:02 +0100, you wrote:

>You wouldn't want to know how many bits you need to store on disk to 
>reliably recreate the value?

I can't say that I have cared about that sort of thing in a very long
time. Bits are rather cheap these days. I store data on disk, and the
space it occupies is whatever it is; I don't worry about it.

>Or how many bits of randomness you need to compute a value less than or
>equal to this one?

I'm not sure I understand this one. I generally don't need _any_
randomness to compute a value. On the other hand, if the desire is to
take an integer n and generate a set of pseudorandom numbers ranging
from 0 to n-1, that's easily done using the standard random number
methods.

-Steve Schafer