Proposal: Move 'split' into a separate class in System.Random

[Duncan Coutts]

On 15 September 2010 17:08, Thomas DuBuisson <thomas.dubuisson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 7:57 AM, Ian Lynagh <igloo at earth.li> wrote:
>> I approve, but what do you propose to do for haskell98:Random?
>
> Someone (me?) should make a matching proposal to Haskell' once we have
> decided on a reasonable way forward.  WRT H98, modifying the Haskell98
> library to have an upper bound on random 1.0.x would make sense.
> Having two incompatible classes is rather inescapable when one is in a
> standard and the other is its replacement.

Right, if we change the class then we do necessarily make it
incompatible with H98, so H98 will have to have its own definition of
Random that does not share type or class definitions with the random
package.

I think at that point having the haskell98 package depend on the
random package at all makes little sense. We would just take a copy of
the old H98 code and put that in the H98 package.

> Henning said:
>
>> class StraightRandomGen g where
>>  System.Random.next :: g -> (Int, g)
>>  System.Random.genRange :: g -> (Int, Int)
>>
>> class StraightRandomGen g => RandomGen g where
>
> I favor a clean break with the past and small flurry of fixing
> activity. The more concessions made in the base libraries the odder
> all libraries will feel.

I agree. As much as possible I think we should deal with API changes
using package versioning and not by making more convoluted names.

Duncan