Hello, friends

I'm not sure I am the best person to comment on this, as I'm not a
scheme implementor (well, I am, but I don't intend to develop
schemetran further).

To be honest, I do not see a valid reason for such an extension to
Scheme as a language. Clearly, "some" sort of random number generation
is crucial for a decent programming language.

However, there is a difference between "basic needs of a programming
language" and a full-blown statistical CAS, and the discussion that is
happening in the mailing list looks way more like one fit for the
discussion for a statistical CAS than a language extension.

(FWIW, If implementing a CAS, I wouldn't like any pre-built generators
at all, I would prefer a good data structure for representing
distributions, a mean of combinations of those, and a completely
independent set of sampling algorithms, accepting those distributions
as parameters in order to produce generators.)

I understand that this srfi is essentially a documentation of an
existing practice, and is not expected to be perfect, but if a
portable r7rs library already exists, is implementable using already
portable extensions, why should it be an srfi?

So, in general, even though random numbers could be a good use case
for generator application, I do not think that this srfi is an example
of good design, and if its aim is to be an illustration of srfi-27 and
srfi-154, I would rather remove all non-uniform distributions
altogether, as this would factor out a lot of questions regarding
statistical rigour. (Which is itself a huge, and still incomplete
research area.)

Sorry for being so skeptical.

--
Yours sincerely, Vladimir Nikishkin