trivial random ports for deterministic seeding Peter McGoron (31 May 2026 16:58 UTC)
Re: trivial random ports for deterministic seeding Shiro Kawai (31 May 2026 18:12 UTC)
Re: trivial random ports for deterministic seeding Vincent Manis (he/him) (31 May 2026 18:30 UTC)
Re: trivial random ports for deterministic seeding Wolfgang Corcoran-Mathe (01 Jun 2026 00:11 UTC)
(missing)
Re: trivial random ports for deterministic seeding Wolfgang Corcoran-Mathe (01 Jun 2026 02:50 UTC)
Re: trivial random ports for deterministic seeding John Cowan (01 Jun 2026 06:25 UTC)
Re: trivial random ports for deterministic seeding Peter McGoron (01 Jun 2026 11:55 UTC)
Re: trivial random ports for deterministic seeding Wolfgang Corcoran-Mathe (02 Jun 2026 00:29 UTC)
Re: trivial random ports for deterministic seeding Wolfgang Corcoran-Mathe (01 Jun 2026 00:14 UTC)
Re: trivial random ports for deterministic seeding Peter McGoron (01 Jun 2026 00:39 UTC)
Re: trivial random ports for deterministic seeding Peter McGoron (01 Jun 2026 00:52 UTC)

Re: trivial random ports for deterministic seeding Peter McGoron 01 Jun 2026 00:37 UTC

 > Thank you!

You're welcome :)

 > I don't know whether these ports belong in SRFI 271.

They are a little odd: there's little reason to seed them from another
binary port, for instance.

 > They could be described in a short standalone SRFI.

If all you need is to output a cyclic bytevector from a port, then one
could do it with SRFI 181 / R6RS custom ports / any
implementation-specific method. You can't implement `random-port-state`
on it, but that has questionable use for these types of ports in general.

The benefit of adding it to this SRFI is that implementations without
custom port support would be able to support seeding from cyclic ports.
(It is also, technically, an RNG. It is a bit like a one-time pad: if
what you're doing requires less than the number of bytes in the input,
then you can craft a seed that passes any statistical test observing
only those inputs.) I don't know of any other uses for this type of port.

-- Peter McGoron