> From: Andy Wingo <wi...@pobox.com> > That would indeed be a mean thing to do! It's not what I'm suggesting > though. Deprecation means causing Guile to emit warnings, at > compile-time or at runtime, indicating that a particular interface will > go away at some point, and noting the interface that should be used > instead. > > I think it's fairly helpful, actually, but if you have any suggestions
> for how it could be improved, they are much welcome. My beef is with potentially removing the ability to use an integer seed in seed->random-state. It is useful and common. Many other languages and schemes do it the same way. Its strengths and limitations are indicated in the manual. I could make a technical argument about why this procedure's calling structure w.r.t. integers shouldn't change: but the technical argument would just be an attempt to justify my personal opinion that a documented API that I have used in scheme code that currently works fine shouldn't be broken. This is orthogonal to the bug in the procedure, though. A user should be able to expect the for each integer seed between 0 and 2^N, for some value of N, that the PRNG will return a different series. It works that way in most languages that allow integer seeds. Thanks, Mike
