range vs sample semantics

[leontalbot]

Really nice work!!
One thing that comes in mind:
In the example provided in the readme, there seems to be a variation in semantics whether we're dealing with Random number generation or Sampling.

;random
(def rng (random/create "foobar"))
(random/next-int! rng 5)
;sample
(sample (range 5) :seed "foobar")

Would it be interesting to have consistent semantics?

(random/next-int! (range 5) :seed "foobar")
(sample (range 5) :seed "foobar")

Congrats for your excellent work! Looking forward for using that lib!

[ashenfad]

Thanks!

But providing a seed to random/next-int! rather than a mutable generator doesn't make much sense to me. For a given seed we'd always end up generating the same number. Instead random/next-int could return both a random number and a new seed for the next call, but using that sounds awkward to me.

A seed could be nice, however, if it were used to generate an entire sequence of random numbers:

(defn rand-ints
  "Generates an infinite seq of integers from [minimum, maximum)."
  [minimum maximum & {:keys [seed]}]
  (let [rng (random/create (or seed (rand)))
        diff (- maximum minimum)]
    (repeatedly #(+ minimum (random/next-int! rng diff)))))

Is that closer to what you were thinking?

[leontalbot]

oh, your're right!

rand-ints is really nice!