[Haskell-cafe] why is Random in System?

[Thomas DuBuisson]

I think of it as natural for exactly the reason you stated (the data
comes from the OS).  It seems even more natural to me in the entropy
package module 'System.Entropy' as I am accustom to the phrase system
entropy.  Equally, I would fine a 'Network.Entropy' module acceptable
under the assumption it connects to one of the public random number
servers for it's data.

Perhaps a top level "Random." should be used, but that too can be
questioned.  For example, when I import the module "Random" or perhaps
"Random.Generators" would I get fast prngs?  Cryptographic prngs?
Both?  Something else (both slow and weak, like what we have now ;-)
)?

Cheers,
Thomas

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 1:04 PM, Evan Laforge <qdunkan 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?
>
> I'm not sure where I would expect Random to go, perhaps Math or maybe
> the toplevel, but under System seems, well, random...
>
> I notice random-fu puts it under Data, which is also not where I'd
> look, except that you always look in Data because everything goes into
> Data... but algorithms dealing with random numbers aren't really data
> structures either, are they?
>
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