[Haskell-cafe] Mersenne-random and standard random API

[Aleksey Khudyakov]

On 09.02.2012 18:27, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> Actually it is not true that the state has to be copied. Using the
> lazy ST monad we can implement this interface and internally use
> mutable ST arrays.
>
> See for example
> http://web.archive.org/web/20090108050217/http://www.augustsson.net/Darcs/MT/MersenneTwister.hs
>
> It ends up with this function that generates the infinite lazy
> sequence of words from a seed word. This can be then made to fit the
> next :: g ->  (Int, g) interface, with g = [W].
>
This is very elegant trick! Ability to snapshot and restore generator
is lost.

>
> So yes this looses a small constant factor because of the extra lazy
> list (which could be reduced somewhat), so it's not suitable for the
> absolutely max performance interface, but it certainly allows the use
> of traditional mutable PRNGs with the nice interface with decent
> performance.
>
> Certainly none of these PRNGs support split, but that's a separate
> issue. Overall, I think the Random type class is salvageable given a
> few changes. In the end, the Random module probably needs both an
> ST-monadic interface and a pure one. People can use the ST one if it
> happens to be more convenient or if they need to squeeze the last drop
> of performance out.
>
There is another problem. Functions like `next' aren't meant to be used 
by humans. One have to thread state manually and this is tedious
and error-prone. So PRNG should be wrapped into monad. Are `next'-like
function needed at all?

I'd expect that creation of generic and useful type class would be
very nontrivial.