On Oct 8, 7:36 am, "William Stein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I do encourage David to open a trac ticket about this. He's right that > seeding the random number generator should be possible via a command > line argument at startup.
But which random number generator? libc, Python, libpari, NTL, libgmp... not counting the many subprocesses that have their own random number generator. I have a rough proposal to try to bring some order to this mess. Randomness in SAGE should be centered in a "randgen" object. There is a global default randgen, but others can be created. All algorithms that use random numbers should take an optional randgen parameter, and use the numbers from there. The numbers from a randgen would be portable across architectures. This would have several advantages. Randomized algorithms could be run repeatably, for testing or debugging. All of our "random" doctests could be tested, instead of ignored. I would be willing to work on this, if people think it's a good idea. What do you think? Carl --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
