From: ptkwt@...1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2003-02-25T05:50:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Objectify the mersenne twister in 1.8?

In article <Pine.GSO.4.44.0302241954001.29665-100000@solen.ce.chalmers.se>,
Robert Feldt  <feldt@ce.chalmers.se> wrote:
>Hi,
>
>Its good news that Ruby 1.7.x and later uses the Mersenne Twister for
>rand. However, I feel we should have "taken it all the way" and introduced
>a class for RNG's for which MersenneTwister is subclass and rand/srand
>are really calls to an instance of a MersenneTwister instance.
>
>I'd like to know any reasons not to go down that route. The added
>complexity would be minimal since the mt algorithm is already in the
>interpreter.
>
>The main benefits imho would be:
>
>* Multiple different rng streams can be used independently from each other
>* Persistence of rng streams by marshalling MT objects
>* Conceptually nicer, more oo
>

This is a good idea. It would also make it easier to 'plug-in' different 
RNG algoithms for different rng streams.

Phil